Jenna Raine might just be on her way to becoming the next Taylor Swift. With 1.6 million followers on TikTok, several viral pop hits under her belt, a rising acting career, and a sweet Southern charm, Raine is bound to become a household name — despite the fact she’s just 18 years old.
On Sept. 2, Raine dropped her new song “Fumbled The Bag,” inspired by two of her close friends who went through breakups over the summer and how their exes, well, fumbled the bag. “[The song] is meant to help them realize that their ex is the one who messed up, not them,” Raine tells Her Campus.
Raine originally teased the song on TikTok to her followers because she had a “gut feeling” it was going to blow up. Her intuition was right — after releasing the song out into the world, “Fumbled The Bag” received over 100,000 streams in less than 24 hours on Spotify.
Writing that song was a collaborative effort (she and two co-writers took turns on one piano to work out the chords and lyrics), but Raine is also used to writing songs on her own. At the start of 2021, Raine decided to make her own TikTok series of writing 100 songs (yes, one hundred) in a year.
“My songwriting coach told me two or three years ago to write 100 songs to become a decent writer,” Raine says. “So I was like, you know what? I’m going to do it and I’m going to make it a part of a TikTok challenge.” (While Raine ended up having to scrap her goal of writing all of them in a year, she is “literally about to hit 100 songs now, almost two years later.”)
Wanting to make her series more collaborative, Raine reached out to her followers for help, asking them to tell her what to write about — and that’s how her best hit to date, “see you later (ten years)” came to fruition (it was her “44th or 45th song” of the series). The song practically catapulted her into fame overnight, with now over 71 million streams on Spotify.
Raine recounts the moment when she knew the song was going to be her big break. “My dad really liked the song, which was super surprising because he’s so brutally honest, he’d be like, ‘That sounds like all the other ones,’” Raine shares. “But when I played him [the song], he went, ‘Jenna, that’s amazing.’ And I was like, ‘Really? I just wrote it in 30 minutes, I don’t know.’ And he was like, ‘Yes, you have to post this.’”
Despite “see you later (ten years)” being her largest hit thus far in her career, Raine has actually been making music for almost a decade. She got her start in a girl group called L2M at the age of 10 and moved out to Los Angeles. The group lasted four years before disbanding and Raine decided to pursue her solo career.
“I loved the fact that we were a team,” Raine says of L2M. “I love people, but it was a nice change to go solo, get to make my own decisions, and get to pick where I want to go creatively.”
Going solo has also given Raine the opportunity to go after other dreams besides singing — and one of those dreams is acting. In 2017, Raine starred in a YouTube Red original series called Hyperlink, and she’s set to appear in the upcoming movie Camp Hideout with High School Musical alum Corbin Bleu. “La La Land came out the month we were filming [a] TV show and I was in LA. I remember coming out of the theater with my parents and I was just sobbing my eyes out,” Raine says. “And I was like, ‘I want to make people feel this way if I’m in a film.’ I even have an LED La La Land sign in my bedroom that my manager Scott got for me.”
When I ask her what she likes more — acting or singing — Raine tells me acting feels “like a crush,” while singing is her “first love.” But whether she’s singing or acting, Raine just wants to make people feel something — just like how La La Land did for her six years ago.
“What I want to do through my music is comfort people and give people a safe space,” Raine says. “I don’t really care how much my name gets out there or not.”