What do you get when you put high school, music, boys, and me all together? You get a 16 year old girl with a love of singing and songwriting who is trying to make a name for herself. I have been singing for as long as I can remember, but I have been taking singing lessons from Camilla Cook for the past 8 years. With her I have been able to increase my range, improve my technique, and become the musician I am today. I have included a link to the website of C&C Vocal and Music Services if you wanted to check out her and her husband. I started songwriting the summer between grade 7 and grade 8. But in order to tell you that story I have to tell you this story. My mom had heard about auditions for The Sound of Music in Toronto. I of course wanted to audition, I love musicals and my dream was to be a stage performer. I went to the open call and my mom and I waited for a few hours in line until it was finally my turn. And I got a call back, and then another call back, and another, until there were only 6 girls left for the role I was auditioning for. But it was at that time that they told me that I didn’t get it, I was and inch and a quarter too tall and my hair wasn’t the right colour. I was devastated. I told myself that I was never going to audition again. It was at that time that I started writing music. We had a family friend, Heidi Huettner, who taught me 5 guitar chords and changed my life. She taught me about the basics of songwriting, about different rhyming patterns and the order songs go in. I co-wrote my very first song with her, it was about my favorite food. And then my songwriting took off, I was writing songs every few days and I had written a song a day. But then I ran out of ideas, Heidi was gone, and I was all alone with nothing to write about. Sure, I wrote a few songs after that but they were all flops. It wasn’t until I was in grade 9 that I got a new inspiration … boys! I wrote a song about the guy I liked who eventually became my first boyfriend. We broke up after 3 weeks, but I gave it a go. Then that became all I wrote about, crushes, broken hearts, pain, happiness, but all surrounding boys. These are things that make me feel something strong, something real, and something I feel that I need to express. I write music about things that really matter to me and things that make me have strong emotions, otherwise I can’t write anything that I particularly like to sing. When I sing for people a lot of them ask, “Why haven’t you been discovered yet?” or, “Do you have a youtube channel?” and at the time I had no answer for them, I didn’t understand why I had not been discovered and why my dreams had not come true and I didn’t have a youtube channel, I thought I was too young and that no one would ever see my video’s in a digital world where everyone was trying to do the same thing. But this time will be different! I am going to try my very best to make it because I believe I can and I believe that I am good enough and strong enough and brave enough to do this. I want the music industry to be my normal!
So join me as I follow my dreams! There may be success. There will be failure. But not a moment will be wasted!
