Hannah Aldridge, 26, is steeped in the music both of Nashville and Muscle Shoals, the two cities where she was raised as her father – a Muscle Shoals legend as well as a much-honored Nashville songwriter, musician and producer – plied his craft. Her musical youth was spent being trained to be a classical pianist. She didn’t begin writing songs until, as a 21-year-old sound-engineering student at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, TN she took a songwriting class as an elective. “I literally thought we were going to learn how to write songs,” she says. After discovering students were expected already to have written songs, she turned to her dad for help. “I found out it really wasn’t that hard: It’s just saying things that are true and making them rhyme,” says the young woman who began her performing career at Nashville’s most famous singer-songwriter venue, The Bluebird Café, after she was among students chosen to represent MTSU in a showcase. “It was so wild: I had gotten picked out of all those people who wanted to be songwriters.” She sang her entire three-song catalog that night. Two years later, Hannah signed a publishing deal after her song ‘Lonesome’ was featured on the Hart Of Dixie television series. “That song has been a launching pad for me,” she says.

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