Jessica Harp photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Nashville.

In June 2004, aspiring country singer Jessica Harp packed everything into her car and left her Kansas City, MO, hometown for Tennessee to finalize a recording contract with Nashville indie-label Dualtone Music Group. Fate intervened when her best friend Michelle Branch called somewhere along the way and asked her to form a country/pop duo, which the girls dubbed The Wreckers. A No. 1 country single, a gold album, a Grammy-Award nomination, and high-profile tours with Rascal Flatts and Keith Urban followed, but Jessica could never shake the feeling of wanting to show the world what she could do on her own.

Now she finally has that chance with the upcoming release of her major-label solo debut A Woman Needs — a breezy modern-country collection that finds the honey-voiced Jessica telling appealingly relatable stories about her life, loves, and heartbreaks on tracks like the playful "Boy Like Me," the feisty "A Woman Needs," and the earthy "Homemade Love." "Country music is about real people and real things, and that always spoke to me not only as a music fan, but as a singer-songwriter," Jessica says. "I like to tell stories with my songs. This is the album I have dreamed of making since I was eight years old and singing along to my mom's Judds and Reba McEntire records."

Jessica grew up on six acres in a rural pocket of northern Kansas City, and remembers sitting out on the porch with her family playing guitar and singing. "I was a ham when I was a little girl," she says. "I was always putting on shows for my family." Raised on a steady diet of country (thanks to her mom's love for McEntire, the Judds, and Alan Jackson), as well as rock, blues, and folk (Dad's influence), Jessica was given an acoustic guitar and a chord chart at age 12 by her father, who taught her three chords. Hooked, she began to write and eventually perform her songs live on the local circuit in Kansas City. "I'd play at a county contest in front of the Big V Country Mart in my Western shirt and Wrangler jeans," she recalls with a laugh. In 2002, she released Preface, a compilation of songs she had written as a teenager. "It was my first real recording, so I can't completely denounce it," she says.

A development deal with Elektra Records followed, but the label was pushing Jessica in a pop direction. "That was when I realized that I didn't want to be a pop singer, I wanted to be a country singer," she says. She had just moved to Nashville when Branch asked her to record a group of songs the duo had written during the time Jessica had toured with Michelle as a back-up singer. The two had formed a close bond on the road and discovered that their voices blended in near-sibling harmony. "I knew there was something special about our voices together and the songs Michelle and I had written," Jessica says. "I thought they deserved a chance to be heard, so I said yes without hesitation." And so she deferred her dream of being a solo artist to form The Wreckers with Michelle. In 2006, the girls released their debut album Stand Still, Look Pretty, which was certified gold and spawned two hit singles, the Grammy Award-nominated "Leave the Pieces," which topped the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, and "My Oh My."

"Being in The Wreckers was a fun and exciting time," Harp says. "It was also a crash course in doing music as a job, as it was my first major-label album, my first time playing on live television, my first No. 1 single. I look at it as my college experience – Music Biz 101."

The girls had always agreed that they'd keep The Wreckers going for as long as it felt right. So when both Jessica and Michelle felt they were going in different creative directions when it came time to record a second album, they decided not to force it. "I think we knew it was better for both of us to move on as solo artists and come back to each other in the future if we felt ready for that," Jessica says.