Former Miss Ariz. seeks country music stardom
There was a time, before she’d grown up to be crowned Miss Arizona, when Jennifer Smestad was certain she’d never be able to realize her dreams of becoming a singer.
She had her first solo at 3 when her mom enrolled her and her sister in a local singing group called Sunshine Generation.
“It was a lot of fun,” the Gilbert native says.
But over time the thought of getting up in front of people to perform became a lot less fun for Smestad. She’d become extremely shy and was diagnosed, at 10, with Tourette Syndrome, social anxiety and OCD.
“It was severe,” she recalls.
She still wanted to be a singer. “But it felt impossible,” she says. “Being shy from 10 years old until the end of high school, I could not even give speeches in front of my classmates. No one knew I sang because I would run out of the recital room. I wouldn’t sing in front of anybody.”
How Smestad overcame her fear of public speaking
In her junior year at Chandler High School, Smestad had what she calls a huge turning point.
“I wanted to be in Student Council for my senior year,” she says.
“And in order to do that, you had to give a speech in front of your entire graduating class, which was, like, 800 people. I’m like, ‘There’s no way I’m doing this.’ But I’ve always had some sort of drive and determination in me.”
She decided she wanted it more than she was afraid of it. So she rewrote the words to a popular song at the time — the Travie McCoy and Bruno Mars hit “Billionaire” — to be about why everyone should vote for her.
She’s pretty sure “I wanna be in student council so freaking bad” was among her lyrical revisions.
“So I ended up getting elected,” she says, with a laugh. “And I honestly felt empowered by that and just continued to do little steps since then.”
Not all those steps were little.
Her next step was to audition for ‘American Idol’
During her senior year of high school, she traveled to Nashville with her mom for an “American Idol” audition.
She didn’t make it on the show, but she was conquering her fears.
In 2011, the year she graduated high school, she went to see her friend Jennifer Sedler compete in the Miss America pageant and decided she would like to do that, too. So she enrolled in the one college class she swore she’d never take. Public speaking. “Honestly, that class helped me prepare for Miss Arizona,” she says.
“It helped me feel somewhat confident in front of a crowd. It helped me with speaking. So I really just started to throw myself into these situations that I was scared to death of, knowing that eventually it was going to get easier.”
Two years later, she was crowned Miss Arizona and took part in the 2013 Miss America pageant.
By the time Smestad earned her degree in communications from Grand Canyon University, she was comfortable enough with public speaking that she ended up being the commencement speaker at her graduation.
After college, Smestad moved to Nashville
It was shortly after graduation that she moved to Nashville to pursue her childhood dream of a career in country music.
“I just have always wanted to do country music,” Smestad says. “It’s like it’s in my blood. I grew up on ‘90s country. And I pretty much have my 3-yearold dream in my 28-year-old body now. Because I have not changed.”
She’d fallen in love with the city on that trip with her mom to audition for “Idol.”
“For me, it was just a matter of time,” she says.
“The only thing that was holding me back from moving was a relationship I was in and it was a bad relationship. So right when we broke up, I’m like, ‘Alright, this is my sign. I’m going.’ I just left a month later.”
She found success on TikTok and iTunes
Smestad scored her first real breakthrough on the path to country stardom with her Sony Music Nashville debut “Half the Man,” which peaked at No. 3 on the iTunes country chart after blowing up TikTok.
Smestad wrote the song with Josh Matheny and Erik Halbig about her father, Capt. Gary Smestad, a longtime pilot for United Airlines.
“I’ve always wanted to write a song about my dad, just because every song about a father-and-daughter relationship pulled at my heartstrings,” she says. “Every line in the song describes my dad perfectly.”
Smestad opens the song with “Growing up, there wasn’t much my daddy couldn’t fix/ If it
wouldn’t work he’d make the old look new again/ The house, the fence, the bike, the car, the little girl tears from a broken heart.”
The point, as she sings in the chorus, is “Daddy set the bar real high/ Showed me what a real man looks like/ It’s gonna take one to fill those shoes/ In his eyes, nothing less will do.”
So now, she’s looking for “the man that’s half the man that my daddy is.”
Her first hit was about her father
Her dad was obviously honored when he heard the tape of that day’s writing session.
“It was not the best recording, but he loved it,” Smestad says.
“And now, of course, he loves seeing the hundreds and 1000s of videos of other father-daughter relationships, too. He loves knowing a relationship he and I share has bonded more fathers and daughters because of the song. So he watches those videos, like hours, upon hours. I love that he loves it so much.”
The song’s official music video is a mix of current footage of the singer with her father and home movies from her childhood.
“Some of those are at my home in Gilbert,” she says. “And some, we used to go to Lake Powell and Apache Lake on the boat. So they’re all over Arizona.”
Her current single is empowering
Smestad is hoping to build on the momentum of that instant wedding standard with her current single, “Can’t Have Mine,” a song she wrote with Shelby Darrall and Toby Sides.
She says the song grew out of something Darrall said.
“She was like, ‘I have this idea where you can say, ‘You took your time, now you can’t have mine.’ And I loved that idea. She was going through a situation with somebody like that, and I’m like, ‘Oh, I’ve totally been there.’ So it was very easy to relate to.”
As they were writing it, it felt to Smestad like a sad song or a breakup song.
“But then I stepped away from it,” she says.
“And maybe a week or two later, after posting it on social media, I realized it was actually a very empowering song. It’s emotional but empowering. So that was exciting to realize that I didn’t write just a sad country song.”
She’s learned a lot about the country music world since moving to Nashville. But the most important thing she’s learned is that it’s best not to compare your path to other people’s journeys.
“We’re in an industry, just like Miss Arizona, where we’re judged,” she says.
“We’re trying to win, to beat the other person out. We’re trying to get the No. 1. The biggest thing I’ve learned is just to stay in your own lane and be happy for people in theirs. Because we all have our own paths. There are a million different ways you can make it in music. So I just learned to try to do what works for me, to learn from my mistakes and continue to grow.”