November 29th, 2023
On Nov. 29, Jessica Simpson will be honored with the Icon Award at the 37th annual FN Achievement Awards. Below is an article from the magazine’s Nov. 27 print issue about how she charted a path to icon status by always being herself.
Jessica Simpson is giddy.
Positively bouncing off the virtual walls of Zoom — if that is possible. the camera’s off, but it doesn’t matter. The intonation and signature hint of drawl in her voice are effervescent as ever.
The star immediately launches into a conversation about a flight to Nashville. She has been recording music there recently, after temporarily relocating her family to the city from Los Angeles last summer.
“It’s like a retreat for me. I get to just crawl up inside my head and embrace my heart,” she says. “I feel so enlightened there. Writing music has become a beautiful therapeutic thing for me that I didn’t know was so natural, but it’s because I haven’t done it in so long. It’s just nice to know that I’m meeting myself back in this place, as a woman, and after going through everything that I’ve been through in my life. There’s a sense of freedom and empowerment.” The singer says she has more than 400 poems recorded in her journals from the past few months.
The studio as sanctuary is a familiar trope for any musician, but it has taken the singer through some of her tougher years. She recorded her 2006 album, “A Public Affair,” after a very public divorce from Nick Lachey. It’s also where she went as she was getting sober, reconciling with her father and pondering what to write in her 2020 memoir, “Open Book.” That both of those titles allude to a boundary-less presence in the public sphere is no coincidence. Simpson has always worn her heart — and her inner monologue — on her sleeve.
The new music (set to release in early 2024, with a tour to follow) will undoubtedly add fuel to the fire of current Y2K nostalgia, bringing her millennial followers closer to those halcyon afternoons of the MTV “TRL” era. It also will be a chance to reintroduce Simpson as a music artist, given that a generation of fans know her more for her shoes than as a pop star who broke onto the scene in 1999 at 19 years old. Or, for that matter, as the 22-year-old reality TV wife from “Newlyweds,” the pioneering 2003 MTV series that predated “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” and the “Real Housewives.”
Source: Footwear News