Love Creates Music

Right after I was born, my father wrote a short guitar piece that he played for me every night. He called it “Music Box.” When I was a few years old, he recorded it and uploaded it to iTunes, so I could listen to it before bed even after he stopped tucking me in.

The rest of the day I listened to upbeat pop like Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and The Chainsmokers. But “Music Box” was for me, exactly as old as I was. For as long as I can remember, love creates music, and music creates love, especially in my family.

My dad enrolled me in guitar lessons when I was 6. When I was 8, my guitar teacher Kenji asked me to compose something. After my lesson, I played three notes that I liked together, then played them again while counting out loud. I drew them out on a staff. I replayed them and added two more and wrote those down.

I continued like that until I had two lines. It felt magical: I had brought art into the world.

I kept taking guitar lessons and played in my music school’s concerts every year. In middle school, I made friends with five girls from my neighborhood. We had just started to gel in March of 2020. As our “three-week break” turned into months at home, we made a group chat where we put our poems in a shared document.

We wrote about feeling helpless and overwhelmed and hurting ourselves, using metaphors in our confessions. We each concluded that we weren’t straight, and confessed to crushes on each other. I recorded a voice memo of myself singing and playing girl in red’s “we fell in love in october” and sent it to the group chat (though we all knew it was directed at Audrie, my “group chat girlfriend”).

I longed to tell the five of them how much they meant to me. I wrote a song in which each friend got a verse, and the chorus was about how lucky I felt to know them all, but it never felt good or special enough to send.

The first original song I was proud of started, “Your eyes are tired, young honey / You’re wise beyond your years.” My whole life, people had been telling me, “You have an old soul” and “You seem mature for your age.” I enjoyed the praise, but also felt I had to meet their expectations of my intelligence and maturity. The last verse went:

“Your heart beats fast, kind dear

You summit mountains without looking up

Don’t fear going slow, you’ll still get there

Have faith in yourself, and good luck”

“Wise Beyond Your Years” communicates the pressures of appearing mature when you’re young. It’s about achieving to satisfy what you think other people want, without appreciating those achievements, when really you want to savor them and slow down. In the song, I urge, “Keep going, but it is OK to take your time, even when everyone is watching.” I wished someone had said that to me—which inspired me to share the song.

Talent Shows

At summer camp in 2022, COVID restrictions were finally lifted, and we resumed whole-camp talent shows. When it was my turn, I sat on the wooden stage with my guitar and looked up at the little-girl faces on the hill. I introduced “Wise Beyond Your Years” as “written to my younger self, also to my current self, and also to every younger girl here,” and began to sing. My friends’ faces lit up with pride, and two counselors joked that I would be the next Phoebe Bridgers – who I idolize.

That next year, in 9th grade, I kept studying Phoebe Bridgers and then discovered Adrianne Lenker. Her instrumentation was even more sparse than Phoebe Bridgers’, and her lyrics were more abstract yet still imbued with feeling.

These two artists raised and sharpened my standards for songwriting—poetic, intricate lyrics, and chords or picking patterns that quietly hypnotized. Themes of nature, humanity, and relationships, phrased in a way that made specific experiences seem eternal. Creative use of language. Entire worlds in a few verses and choruses.

We had more opportunities to share our art at camp the summer after 9th grade. I’d brought a new notebook with me, mostly full of love songs about Marco, who had recently become my boyfriend.

When camp ended, I went straight to a music production intensive called Sound Thinking. We worked with partners to write and record songs. Over the three weeks, I wrote lyrics I was satisfied with, helped my partner write and arrange the music, and recorded both of our vocals at a recording studio.

The lyrics felt complete, but the tragedy of it didn’t hit me until I put chords to it a few days later.

Other people in the program were already releasing their music, and we all attended panels of songwriters, producers, and industry professionals. I was proud of the song my partner and I had written in the program and longed to keep writing and recording. But I didn’t have the editing software Pro Tools or a studio to record in, and I did have high school to finish.

I knew I had to keep songwriting, though, so I signed up for Adrianne Lenker’s virtual songwriting workshop last year. I watched her talk about intuition and answer questions on Zoom with about 5,000 other songwriters.

She assigned a song share that encouraged us to be more intuitive: We had to write quickly and play in an open tuning on guitar, or on an unfamiliar instrument.

The song share was incredibly intimidating, but I did it, and the person in my breakout room liked it. I had shared something unfinished, and it went over well! It was a salve for my need to obsessively workshop and perfect a song before performing or sharing it. That perfectionism, the subject of “Wise Beyond Your Years,” pervaded my schoolwork too. “Turning in” something rough allowed me to write music more freely.

Ready to Record

Over the next several weeks I listened to Adrianne talk about cycles of repetition in song, how lyrics function as confessions and descriptions, abstract and literal simultaneously, and how not to take oneself too seriously. I wrote two more songs that didn’t feel finished.

I kept writing and recording myself on voice memos for months. A few months ago, I made a Bandcamp account on an impulse. I converted my voice memos into the appropriate audio file format, made some cover artwork, and uploaded “self-unmade girl” as a single. (I was inspired by watching the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown.)

Then, in March, I went to a recording studio with Marco and my friend Jed, a bass player whom I’d met through Sound Thinking, to record six songs I wrote. Two weeks later, all the tracks were mixed and I walked out of the studio with my first EP on a hard drive. The recording and mixing cost almost $3,000 combined, but it was financed by a fellowship program I participated in.

On the train, I listened to the music I’d been dreaming of for the last two years. It had coalesced in the span of three months from voice memos on my phone to full-band arrangements and completely mixed recordings that I could release.

I signed up with a distributor, DistroKid, which was endorsed by Spotify. Plus, I’d heard good things about it online from other indie musicians and it only cost $25 a year. I uploaded an audio file for my first single—It Sings (Marjorie).

The song is about my grandma, my mother’s mother. She’s had Alzheimer’s for years and is in hospice care. I wrote it in February. I hadn’t seen her in months, since my grandpa (her husband) died—but my mom visits her every weekend.

The first two lines appeared in my mind: “Your name is Marjorie/You don’t know that anymore” and the rest flooded out in half an hour. The lyrics felt complete, but the tragedy of it didn’t hit me until I put chords to it a few days later. Singing it over and over as I found the music, I got choked up.

I made a video of myself singing it and posted it on Instagram. I showed the video to my mom, and we sat in silence for a minute. She asked if she could share it with her brother, who also takes care of Marjorie. She also shared it with her friends.

The week of the Spotify release, friends messaged me how much they loved the song. Strangers responded, too: listeners whose parents and grandparents were also fading away. My mom came into my room the day the song came out. “It means a lot to me that it was this one, you know,” she said. It was for my mom that I’d described the quiet devastation of losing someone beloved to dementia, which she’d been enduring for years.

We hugged. I felt loved, and I felt that I’d shown my love for her. That is why I make music: to connect, whether with strangers or with people already close to me.