Finding her voice! Jessica Simpson not only released her very telling memoir, Open Book, on Tuesday, February 4, she also dropped six new emotional singles, which are available only when buying the accompanying audiobook.
The songs, just as the book, feature the singer, 39, opening about very raw and emotional memories over her life — many about the relationship she has with her father, Joe Simpson.
On Halloween 2017 — the day she explained that she hit rock bottom with her drinking — she also played her dad many of the songs she wrote about his choice to leave her mother, Tina Simpson, including “Practice What You Preach,” “Rolling With the Punches” and “Party of One.”
Jessica was shocked when her father told her that he was leaving her mother in 2012 while she was in the hospital pregnant with daughter Maxwell. “They had been married for 34 years, and I had a hard time being around them together since they’d stopped loving each other,” she writes. “I was blindsided by this news, which triggered his natural salesmanship. He pitched it to me as a positive thing, ‘You gave me the confidence … You gave me the way out.’ Great, I thought to myself, ‘I broke my own heart.’”
The former Fashion Star judge, who explained in the book that she had to fire her dad — who was also her manager — five times before he got the point, also said that she knew he didn’t try to hurt the family with his choices. “I know he knew that because that’s what he had taught me. But I had kept that from him,” she wrote. “And now I needed him to hear that I was singing about him.”
Five years later, “Party of One” was the first song she played him, which is about how she felt “abandoned” when she “needed them most,” about to give birth to her first child.
She wasn’t sure what to expect from her father, but after listening, “he got up and put his arms around me until I shook with tears,” she wrote. “‘I’m so proud of you,’ he said. For the first time in my entire life, he was responding to something I created not as a manager, but as a father … He just said, ‘I love you.'”
Scroll through the gallery below for a breakdown of the six new songs and a few lyrics, provided by Jessica in her book.
