NEW ARTIST ALERT: JAIRA BURNS x UGLY

Singer Jaira (pronounced Jair-ruh) Burns discovered her voice the old fashioned way — in the shower. A precocious 9-year-old, who was always cranking up the radio and warbling along, she challenged her mother to an impromptu sing-off of the Pat Benatar classic, “Love Is A Battlefield.”

The family home had one tiny bathroom so Jaira’s mom was always in the mirror doing her makeup and singing while her daughter bathed. “I can do it just like that,” Jaira remembers hollering back one morning. “My mom was like, ‘No way, come on!’ She sings a line and I sing it back to her. Then she’s like, ‘Sing this line.’ We went back and forth until my mom blurts, ‘Oh my God, Jaira, you can really sing.’”

Born and raised in Vandergrift, a small, rundown town 30 miles outside of Pittsburgh, the prospects for Jaira actually breaking into the music industry were slim. But that didn’t stop the blossoming powerhouse vocalist from putting in work. She honed her natural ability by belting out popular cover tunes over instrumentals she found on YouTube and eventually started posting videos.

Halfway through 6^th grade, she left and started Cyber School so she could spend more time focusing on her art. “It’s a lot harder than people think because you have to set boundaries for yourself,” assures the blue-eyed, blue-haired beauty. “As a child it’s hard to do that. Mondays I would do all of my work for the rest of the week and then sing all day while my parents were gone.”

Eager to learn guitar, she began cleaning houses with her mom until she had enough money to buy her first axe. As fate would have it, one of her mom’s clients, Tom Danaher, happened to reconstruct guitars for Fleetwood Mac and The Who. Impressed by the talented pre-teen’s strong work ethic and sheer ambition, Danaher offered to give Jaira weekly lessons for free.

“That’s when the hunger set in for me to learn and sponge in everything – with this man,” she explains. “He was just so knowledgeable. I really learned how to play guitar, build guitars and fix guitars as well, because he taught me that craft.”

When Jaira was 13, she met local up-and-coming producer, Ryan M. Tedder aka Ryghteous Ryan, through an attorney they both knew. A self-taught musician just eight years her senior, Ryan had already gotten placements with Wiz Khalifa (“Red Carpet”) and Neyo (“Me And You” w/ Kandi Burrus) and was actively looking for new artists to work with under his Upscale Music Group banner.

“I played Rihanna’s ‘Man Down’ on my guitar and sang,” recalls Jaira. “Ryan said immediately, ‘You’re amazing. We need to work.’” A week later, they recorded the teenage love song, “SMH,” at Pittsburgh’s famed ID Labs Studios. “It wasn’t the first time I had a microphone in my hand, but it was my first time in a studio. The session went smoothly and by the time we were done, I knew Ryan and I were meant to go on this journey together. I still get butterflies every time we go into the studio.”

The pair, now inseparable, continued developing, writing and recording together for the next few years. They quietly released an untitled, experimental, 5-song EP in 2014, which was shopped to a few indie labels on the East Coast. “It was beautiful, honestly, but it wasn’t me,” Jaira admits.