Jessica Charlotte Poland (born January 15, 1988), better known by the stage name Charlotte Sometimes, is an American singer-songwriter based out of New York and currently signed to Geffen Records. Her debut album was released on May 6, 2008 and is titled Waves and the Both of Us. She grew up in Wall Township, New Jersey and started playing guitar and writing songs at the age of 14. A record release party was held on the top of Atlas Building, New York and a signing was held the next day at Vintage Vinyl in Fords, NJ.

Biography

She has lived in Wall Township all her life, having been adopted by her parents, Hartson and Tracy Poland, as a baby; with their consent, she was introduced to her birth mother at age 13, with whom she is now friendly.

She got her name from a children’s book, Charlotte Sometimes, written in 1969 by Penelope Farmer. The borrowed name is that of a precocious boarding school student who finds herself transported 40 years into the past, into the body of another girl. This curiously dark children’s story of time-travel and interchangeable identities, interested Jessica from a young age.

Charlotte Sometimes has been singing since before she could talk. Even as a baby, music was the language she understood best. Her charisma and love of an audience seemed a perfect match for musical theater, so she spent her first 13 years in a blur of voice and dance lessons. But as an adolescent, all that staring in the mirror drew Charlotte to a different form of self-expression: poetry. She decided to teach herself to play guitar so she could set her poems to her favorite medium, and that's when she discovered her true passion.

The internet radio station KGRL featured her as their “Flower-Powered Artist” for October 2008, The feature includes an exclusive interview,an in-depth CD Review of Waves & The Both Of Us, exclusive photos, and an on-demand high-definition video stream of her KGRL FPA Live Sessions performance last August 2008

Career

By the time she finished high school, Charlotte had written over 100 songs. She began playing with her five-man band (J. Poland And The Pilots) in early 2006 for people in and around the New Brunswick, NJ area, eventually making treks to New York and other larger venues, opening for artists like Pat Monahan. The band also self-released an album titled "I Promise This Won't Be Released", which was produced by producer/songwriter, Alex Houton, who produced much of Charlotte's early work and co-wrote and produced, and contributed guitar work to her eventual major label, debut album. However, drummer Ricky Joyce, keyboardist Will Macirowski, and guitarist Cory Pula-Bowers are not present on the album. The only musicians from the Pilots on the album are Poland and bassist Mike Basmagy. After signing with Crush Management in Manhattan in 2004, she became the subject of an ElleGirl magazine profile about a high school girl on a mission to land a record-label deal. While Ms. Sometimes was being trailed by a writer and photographer, though, she developed condylar resorption, a jaw disease. The magazine article, which captured her ordeal, was published, but her record-deal ambitions were dashed for some time by the need for facial-reconstruction surgery.

Still, she continued to pursue her music career relentlessly, and now her hard work is paying off: with the release of her debut album, “Waves and the Both of Us,” she has been touring the country with her new band, Charlotte Sometimes.

The first single from Waves and the Both of Us is "How I Could Just Kill a Man," the title borrowed from the Cypress Hill song "How I Could Just Kill a Man."