Apollo teen songwriter finds success in national competitions

Music always came naturally to Jessa Pontier. The 18-year-old Apollo resident said she started singing when she 2 while banging on a toy piano.

She could play a real piano by the time she was 6, and taught herself to play guitar around 10 or 11 — never taking any lessons.

Within a few years, she also started writing her own songs.

“(Music) kind of makes me feel like I’m in my own place,” Pontier said. “Especially once I started being able to write songs. A lot of my songs are very personal, a lot of things I went through myself, as a person. It was really easy for me to speak through music.”

Pontier was recently selected as the winner of a national songwriting competition, hosted by the Denver-based nonprofit, Robbie’s Choice. Pontier said she learned about the contest at school — she is a 2020 graduate of Apollo-Ridge High School — and decided to give it a shot.

She ended up winning both her category and the grand prize, earning a $1,500 award and an expenses-paid trip to Denver to professionally record her song.

The song she wrote, “Dear Lord,” is about maintaining her faith in a turbulent time for the world. Pontier was inspired to write the song after witnessing the suffering of her own family and friends.

The competition organizers, in a Facebook post, called her “an Adele Prodigy.”

“It really means something to be able to have people hear my song and have it going around the way it is,” Pontier said. “Especially with everything going on in the world right now.”

This wasn’t the first time Pontier swept a contest. Last year alone, she won a $1,000 scholarship from Budget Home Theater and the grand prize in Eureka Music’s Christmas Song Contest. But the competition through Robbie’s Hope — an organization focused on teen suicide awareness — was the biggest competition she’s won, Pontier said.

For Pontier, songwriting is an opportunity to express herself in a way that isn’t always easy to do through conversation.

She’s inspired by artists who write songs that are “heartfelt and meaningful.” She tries to emulate that in her own writing, composing songs about relationships, faith and other common themes in her own life. She wants all of her songs to feel relatable, she said.

“I like when people hear my music,” she said. “There are a lot of people, including myself, that keep their feelings to themselves and are unable to talk to people. If they hear music, they’re able to relate to music, and that’s definitely how I am.”

Like playing instruments, songwriting is another thing that comes naturally to her. She often thinks of a melody, will sit at the piano and will have a song finished within 15 minutes.

Pontier has been active in the local music scene. She had a band that played at wineries, car dealerships and other venues around the region. She’s eager to play live again, once the covid-19 pandemic loosens its hold on the region and it’s safe to return to in-person performances.

Moving forward, her success in competition feels like a new opportunity for her music to reach more people. She doesn’t have any specific plans to pursue music full time, but she wants to continue sharing her work through contests and performances.

“I can’t thank everybody enough for the amount of support that they’ve given me,” Pontier said. “There’s a lot of times that I’ve felt down about my music or I felt down thinking ‘this doesn’t sound good.’ There are so many people that bring me back up, and it’s truly an amazing feeling.”