Singer-songwriter and Cheney High School graduate Kären McCormick will be releasing her first new single, “Just a Song,” on March 16.

The single was produced by Matt Carey and recorded in Nashville, Tennessee while McCormick was interning at Warner Music Nashville.

McCormick has always loved Nashville.

“I plan on moving there when I graduate,” said McCormick. “I really wanted to get an experience of living in Nashville before I graduated and the best way for me to do that was an internship. I had a couple internships before here at KHQ and things like that but obviously I wanted something more musically inclined.”

McCormick was a journalist major at first but she then discovered she was more interested in a music business program, so she switched over to communications.

“I applied to 30 internships for the summer and only got an interview with one and I didn’t get it,” said McCormick. “So then in the summer I tried again for fall and Warner was the first one I applied to and fortunately ended up getting it. So I interned in their publicity department from August to about December. It was so fun. I got to go to the CMA after party, got to meet a lot of my favorite singers and I ended up writing Blake Shelton’s bio on Spotify, so it’s all been really fun.”

McCormick discovered her passion for singing when she was seven years old. Her father noticed that she liked singing around the house so he suggested she join her church’s choir. McCormick enjoyed the choir but her passion for singing took off after getting her first guitar at 13 years old.She hasn’t stopped playing since.

McCormick’s first real performance was at 16 years old at the Bing Crosby Theater in  downtown Spokane.

This is not McCormick’s first original song but it is the first one she is releasing to the public.  When the song was first written McCormick was thinking about holding back on releasing it. She wanted to enter it in the Nashville Songwriters Association contest instead.

“Winner gets like $5,000 and they get to have a mentor session with a famous singer-songwriter,” said McCormick. “So when I wrote the song and finished it I planned on just entering it in the contest, I wasn’t planning on putting it on iTunes or anything like that. I played it for the guy [Carey] who ended up producing it, on my guitar and he started bringing it to life and as he started bringing it to life I was kind of falling more and more in love with it. I was like ‘ok, I think this might be the moment, this is the one.’ Really it was when he brought everything to life I decided to release it and I am really glad that I did. I am really excited.”

McCormick’s inspiration for this song came to her while she was in the car listening to a Keith Urban song, “Break on Me.”

“When I was listening to that song it took me back to when I was in the car months before with an ex of mine and we both really liked this song, but now when I was listening to the song it had a different attachment to it,” said McCormick. “So I kind of got this idea of, for everyone else in the room if a song comes on it might be like ‘oh it’s not big deal,’ but for someone else it may be like this means so much more to me than it means to them. That’s really where I got the idea. That is why the tagline is “it’s so much more than just a song.”

McCormick wrote the song in a matter of four hours. After that the recording started in the middle of August.

“We had the first recording and then we started building on it and I wrapped up everything in December,” said McCormick. “But it didn’t take four months to do it, it was just that I had a lot going on with the internship. So I got the official final version in December and then we started working on the artwork.”

The Mason Jar is the first place she is going to perform her new single at.

“It’s going to be like a little single celebration, I am really excited,” said McCormick. “It’s going to be really fun. It’s going to be a small little intimate setting and I am going to have Drey Davis who graduated from Eastern, he plays the drums. He is going to play the Cajon and I am going to have my guitar and we are going to sing. I am going to have fun little extra things that I don’t want to say this yet, but it will be fun.”

The release celebration is Thursday, March 15 at The Mason Jar at 7 p.m. The song is available for preorder now on iTunes.