ATHABASCA — A lot of people have dreams of going to Nashville, it’s so famous you don’t even have to mention it’s in Tennessee, but most go for sightseeing.
They want to see the Grand Ole Opry or to hang out at the Bluebird Café where so many big-name troubadours like Keith Urban, Taylor Swift and even Garth Brooks performed and for one young woman from Smith, Nashville is where she will break into the music scene.
“Last September at the Smith Fair I opened for Gil Grand, he’s a Grammy winning Nashville artist and I did cover songs of 90s country music,” said Jasmine Vatamaniuck, 17, in a Feb. 24 interview. “Sometimes I do original songs, but I do covers just so that people will know it and have fun listening to me.”
Her style is more pop than old school country and she’s finishing off her first album "Day by Day" with the first single, of the same name, set to be released this month.
“I do write country but sometimes I feel mine is more of pop-country in a way, just with the way I write and the way my producer and I just create songs in the studio,” she said.
The album though wouldn’t be possible if not for a fateful night of karaoke.
“My mom put me in piano lessons young and I was in dance lessons and guitar lessons, and I never did much singing,” said Vatamaniuck. “I would sing by myself when no one was home and then one night there was karaoke at Char’s Railway Café in Smith and I was like, ‘Well, let's just give it a try. If I suck that's fine.’”
She sang "Jesus Take the Wheel" by Carrie Underwood and left the crowd stunned, prompting Char herself, Charlotte Fleming, to have her open for Grand and sponsor a 13-song studio album to be released in May.
“I wouldn’t be able to do any of this without her,” she said.
Vatamaniuck’s process is to find a chord she likes, figure out a tune then add the words.
“I finish writing the song and then I record it on my phone as a demo. I send it to my producer, and he suggests things to make it better like adding a little bit of space in between this and lengthening it out a little bit,” she said. “And then I'll go back and like try it and if I like it then I change it, if I don't then I'll just leave it how it is and then once the demo is good to go, we go record it in the studio.”
To get her music on streaming platforms like iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, Amazon Music and more, she uses a distribution site.
“I use TuneCore, so I just prepare my song for the release ... and then you get photos done for a cover picture,” she said. “You upload that, you upload the song, you upload all the information like who wrote it, if there's any credits to anybody else, and then set the date and usually it takes anywhere from three to four weeks for it to fully upload on every platform.”
She will even be adding snippets to social media like TikTok and Snapchat, so hopefully people will start using her music in their videos.
“Every time someone listens to it or downloads it or uses it on a social media platform, I get paid,” said Vatamaniuck. “It's not much, it's like a cent per stream and then nine cents per download.”
But if a song goes viral, she could make more than just pocket change and she does have one song she released August 2021, a powerful ballad about bullying and how it can make people take their own lives, called "You Owe a Life."
If the new album is successful, she can get a publicity team together to help promote herself even further but for now, she wants to get through Grade 11 at Edwin Parr Composite School in Athabasca and hopefully take off to Nashville after performing with Grand again July 1-2 in Smith.
“My next step is to release my single, which is the lead single for my album, and I've already been in contact with a few radio stations that are willing to play it in Edmonton, which is really cool,” she said. “And then release my album in May and perform in July and then we'll see what happens from there. I do plan on going to Nashville this year.”
