Jessie Murph on Working with Jelly Roll & Maren Morris — and Why She Doesn’t Think She’ll Ever Go ‘Fully Country’

In an exclusive interview with PEOPLE, the musician reflects on her road to stardom and the success of her debut LP ‘That Ain’t No Man That’s the Devil’

For as long as Jessie Murph can remember, music has always been what she’s wanted to do.

“It was always my safe space,” the singer/songwriter, 20, tells PEOPLE over the phone. “It was always when things were feeling loud or too much or anything like that, it was my first go-to.”

But it was around 10 or 11 years old that the Nashville-born, Alabama-raised musician knew that being an artist was going to be her career path. “The first instrument I learned was the ukulele and then my grandparents had this s—y keyboard that I would play on,” she recalls. “And I would learn covers on YouTube.”

Over the years, Murph soaked in the music of Adele, Amy Winehouse and Drake before carving out a singular country-meets-pop-meets-hip-hop sound of her own. “I never want to just be one genre,” she notes.

With the help of TikTok and YouTube, Murph was discovered and signed to Columbia Records in 2021. Her debut studio album, That Ain’t No Man That’s The Devil, was released earlier this fall.