Artist Statement
I believe if you asked me to pick a song to represent any point in my life, I could do it. Whether it is the “Where is my Mind” era of 6th grade or if it is my Jeff Buckley heavy sophomore year of high school, I have always had some kind of soundtrack narrating my work, exercise, and especially my moments with friends and family. While I have listened for as long as I can remember, I have only recently fallen in love with writing.
Throughout my time at Berklee College of Music this summer, I had the opportunity to play every day and take part in classes exploring the various facets of music school. While I thoroughly enjoyed all of these classes, my favorites very quickly became the songwriting lectures. For context, I did not go to the program to songwrite. I spent the first week feeling unsatisfied with my schedule because of how much free time I had, which, in hindsight, really was not very much. I took every opportunity to sneak into big songwriting lectures just to learn more. I did this for the next four weeks of classes and loved every minute of it.
Outside of class, I would write in my bedroom, with my roommate, in the classroom, outside in the park, and virtually anywhere I could when I thought of an idea. I am not a person who needs some state of emotional distress to write music, and I am instead able to write about any kind of topic with creative liberty. I believe a song can be tonally very different than a lyric, depending on how it is performed. Much of my music in Boston was very positive because of how happy I was during this experience, and this energy radiated into my songs. I then developed a very free style of writing that characterized the people I saw in my time at Berklee, which frequently deviated from whatever emotion portrayed in my performance.
I love telling stories in my writing. Usually, these are fictitious, but they can frequently become metaphors for relationships and events in my real life. I sometimes struggle with writing compelling lyrics about myself, so instead I will become a narrator for a wacky character, whether that is a smoking cat or a random lady on the street. Through this fiction, I can tell specific and creative tales without feeling too open about my personal conflicts. I believe that is conveyed in one of my more comedic songs lyrically, called “My Cat Won't Stop Smoking”. I wrote this song in just a few minutes in my bed after having a guitar part written for months without any lyrics. I ended up writing about this cat, his owner's perspective, smoking, and destroying his body through his addiction. While at first I did not immediately connect this story to any hidden meaning in my real life, I ended up finding that it really spoke to me about my friends growing up and seeming more like adults than teenagers, and me worrying about them partying and going out.
In my next few years as a musician, I know I will maintain this love for writing even if I am performing or behind the scenes. I will continue to create periods of my life filled with a variety of songs, and hopefully, I will soon enter a phase where that song can be one of my own - a free and optimistic point at the beginning of my career as a songwriter.
