Growing up, I had a nice little stack of tapes. Among some of my most treasured were the Beach Boys, Carol King, Gloria Estefan and Celine Dion. Thanks, Mom and Dad. That's quite a variety playlist. When everyone in my household was busy-bodying around with household projects, I was belting All By Myself to an empty guest room and a hairbrush or dancing around to trippy Brian Wilson pop songs with friends. I freaking loved music. Somewhere in between choreographing dances to the beach boys with my neighborhood cronies and memorizing the lyrics to You've Got A Friend I thought to myself, "I want to write a song."
The angstie years of high school proved to be the ideal environment to kick-off song-writing. As we all know, during the charming, memorable years between 13 and 17, nothing is fair and everyone is against you. With all that looming adversity, is there a better time to write a song? Whatever was happening in my life got turned into a script, disguised as a lyric, and then the music was clumsily woven in through the words and worn like a comfy sweater I never wanted to let go of. Once each song was complete I had myself a modern-day time capsule. Any song written in that method – straight from real life experience – always felt very personal. And performing biographical songs in particular still feels a bit like reading my diary to strangers.
Of course, not every song I've written is derived from deep dark teenage rebellion or unrequited high school love. As I grew up and grew out of the "my life isn't fair" mindset, I started to broaden my methods of song-writing. For over 2 years of my music career, I was a signed writer in the Music City who sat in a room 4 days a week and wrote about pretty much anything you can think of. Seriously, anything. So with over 10 years of song-writing under my belt, these days, my repertoire varies from ballads about falling in and out of love to satirical cheese-pop and even a couple slightly embarrassing songs about Lebron James. Friends of mine who have never written by trade always ask how it works – "How do you go about writing a song?" Well the only way I know how to explain it is by telling you a story. This particular story is reflective of the OG process I started out writing in...real life dramatics...
The song is called Carry Me Away, and the day I wrote it was the always under-anticipated day after a big break up. The haze had abruptly worn off, and reality had hit me like a big, dumbfounding eighteen-wheeler. I was overdramatically sad. The only thing I knew to do was write about it. The words poured out. Sometimes that's a good thing, and sometimes it leads to total crap. I sat there in my room for hours, alone with my guitar, my not-so-nice thoughts and a notebook. Getting what I was feeling out on paper and into a few minor chords made me feel like I was a just a little bit freer from the situation. I was so furious, so hurt, and so shocked – it came out loud and clear in that lyric and the entire tone of the song.
My fellow song-writers know, the next step after you write the song is to actually play it for other human beings. So after a cooling off period of maybe month, my break up still stung, but I had a writer's round scheduled. Time to rip off the bandaid and throw the song into the set list. The thing is, you never really know how a song is going to go over. Because when you play a new song for friends and family, they'll tell you it's great. Sometimes they will even unintentionally lie to you – they can't help it. They have love-blinders on. That's the thing about unconditional love – it can skew something that's total crap into appearing to be something lovely. So the only way to really know if a song is winner is to play it for people who don't love you, and watch them. Oh, and mentally prepare for rejection. Strangers are always the most honest, whether they mean to be or not. You'll see it on their faces. If they like it? They stop everything and listen.
When the day of the writers round came, I was sitting on stage with three other aspiring writer-friends to my right and left on high top stools with their guitars in hand. Real time – you sit there in a line on stage and wait until it's your turn to play, cheering your friends on until the mic is yours to take. All the while, you're sweating and shaking and pretend-smiling your way through it. Suddenly it's your turn. Time to play the song I wrote about getting my heart ripped out and stomped on to a room full of strangers in downtown Nashville – the home of every award winning song-writer you can think of. NBD.
I never know how to introduce that song, so I just went right into it. I started singing, searching every face in the crowd to see what they were thinking. When you're on stage, people stare up at you, as if there's one way glass between you and them. At any average show, I'd be on stage, panning over a room of people trying to keep their voices down so they can keep their conversations going. But this time, they had all stopped talking. It was dead silent. The only thing I could hear in the venue was my own voice and the acoustic guitar. Even the bar tender had stopped. My heart was on speed. The broken part of it? Gone. Every person in that room was with me, on my side, feeling what I had felt. They were listening. At the end of the song, I felt like I had shared a secret I'd been keeping from everyone, including myself.
Whether people want to admit it or not, everyone has had their heart broken. Every single one of us remembers that gut-wrenching feeling. It's pretty unforgettable. But what I've discovered over the last 10 years of loving and writing music is that songs unite people who never knew they had something in common. It's amazing that a 4 minute song can do that. That night, playing "Carry Me Away" at the Listening Room was one of the coolest moments I've had in my music career. Not because it made me any money or brought me any kind of notoriety, but because it helped me realize that if a song is real and honest, it isn't just a song. It becomes an invisible link from the heart of the writer to all the people who have ever felt the same way. So, as it turns out, although it can be tortuous and humiliating, reading your diary to strangers might not be such a bad thing after all. Most of the time any way.