As she was driving to the 3065 Live music venue Friday night, musician Jillian Jensen wrote the very last song on her new EP – par for the course, she said, when it comes to songwriting.

“Sometimes, it’s super-easy, and it just comes to you automatically,” Jensen said. “Other times, you have to work for it.”

The 22-year-old Rochester native performed the hours-old song that night in front of a crowd of at least 40 people at the Buzzards Play Productions 3065 Live venue, along with a selection of her other songs. Jensen has been on the musical path for most of her life, and has been on musical competition shows "The X-Factor" and "American Idol."

Jensen recently returned to her hometown after three months of working as a singer for Carnival Cruise Lines, a job that took her all the way to Australia. She said the job, which she got through a friend who hires for the company, was “very last minute,” but that she lives “very impulsively, and will go wherever the wind takes me.”

“[I had a week] to pack and get everything, all my medicals, done,” Jensen said.

Singing “four hours a day, every day, and being thrown songs and having to learn them overnight, literally every day” was an excellent, if taxing, learning experience, she said.

“It increased my repertoire, it increased my range, it killed me some nights,” Jensen said. “Before I left, and now being back – I am so much stronger as a performer, and as an individual, too.”

But Jensen did not always understand how difficult a career in music was going to be. She said she used to be “very naive”, and believed the music industry was easy to break into. She also used to believe “the sky [was] the limit” – and, though she still does believe this, she believes it in a different way.

“Now, I still have that same belief, but more in a realistic tone because music isn’t one thing,” Jensen said. “It varies. There’s so many things you can do with it.”

Jensen said it's personal experience that draws the songs and music she writes out of her heart.

“Very, very personal experiences,” Jensen said. “[But] sometimes, I’m just in a darn good mood, and I want to write something. It’s as simple as that.”