Music and Songwriting: Falling In Love and Overseas Music Changed My Songwriting

I really did move back to Texas at the drop of the dime. A couple of days before I moved I ended up vowing that I was done with my “puppy love”. He called me as soon as I got on the road and I didn’t tell him that I was leaving Cali at all. I felt that he took me for granted, so who cared. He called me again the day after I arrived in back in Dallas, and then I finally told him. I hung up with no remorse and I never looked back. What someone should of told me was that something was coming that would change my life for years to come, and shape a lot of things. I had gone up to my new school to get the new student packet and I remember this guy poked his head in the office and in my head I said, “Well I may like this school. He’s cute, and besides my best friend is here anyways. This can’t be so bad.” I hit it off with the guys instantly. School was about over for the 8^th grade year anyway but there were some cuties. The first two guys I went with provided some hilarious songwriting material. Everything about that place provided some good songs for me. I finally lived in a neighborhood that I actually went outside in so it was some good inspiration to write about different topics. I ended up going with the guy that poked his head in the office. I ended up producing about 500 songs inspired by him over the course of the next 7 years (2005-2011). He ended moving away but we kept in touch as you see. August of 2005 I started high school. A lot of dating and having fun, I joined Drill Team so I was always at the games or at some type of function. A lot of fun songs and just overall a lot of random songs were written then. I became a huge fan of music videos, my CD collection was just ridiculous, and I wasn’t listening to the radio as much as I used to. Winter of 2006 I ended up moving back to Palmdale, CA to live with my dad. It was weird, all of a sudden my dad got super strict when I got to high school. I was literally going crazy because I couldn’t talk to that guy that had poked his head in the office that day. My dad wouldn’t let me talk on the phone or use the internet for a month because I was on punishment. That month seemed like years when I was in love. I know that if we didn’t live on different coasts I probably would of ran away and told him let’s get married and have a family so I’ll have to never go back to that forsaken place lol! I was truly in love. Even though I was only 14, I knew it and to this day, I haven’t experienced anything like that again. Since I couldn’t talk to him, I stayed locked up in my room with the lights out, turning a lamp on every now and then. I would only come downstairs to eat, and I wouldn’t stay long because I didn’t really want to eat. I started a journal to help my take my mind off of him. That helped a little but I knew I would just have to confront the problem head on. So I wrote, I wrote, I wrote and I wrote. It was days where I would write 3 songs and be done. Some days I couldn’t handle it as much as others so I would write 20 songs that day. The middle of February came around and I could easily write a song for you in 15 minutes: Verse 1, Verse 2, Chorus, B-Section (Pre-Hook), Bridge and occasionally Intros and Outros. I finally got to talk to him and I don’t know if that helped on hindered me. I fell in love with him even more, but I could tell that yeah he loved me, but he wasn’t in love with me, which lead to even more songs. My songs and my journals were filled with him. I couldn’t escape it even if I wanted to. I need another outlet. Every Monday night I would listen to FNF Radio which consisted of Lupe Fiasco and Bishop G. This was before Lupe even dropped his first album. I spent hours updating and organizing my iPod. I MySpaced my life away, but he was there too. I would talk on the phone with friends but even when I hated him, I still wanted to talk to him, but then I didn’t. I started finding reasons to stay after school, I started watching the channel, The N, heavy; but Degrassi reminded me of youth “love” problems. Some days I actually got tired of writing and just wanted to do something else. I can’t remember how it happened, but I found an artist by the name of Maria Mena randomly on Limewire. Yes I was a huge fan of Limewire. I still went to the store to by albums, but Limewire gave me access to Mixtapes, Unreleased tracks, Demos and artists that I didn’t have access to because they didn’t release their music in the United States. Maria Mena happened to be one of those people who didn’t release her music in the United States, she is Norwegian. Her album ♫Apparently Unaffected♫ mirrored how I felt for the guy that I was in love with, and it was scary! She wrote what I wanted to write but in a more lyrical way. To this day she is my favorite songwriter. She tells her stories unlike no other and you really have to listen closely sometimes in order to get what she is saying. She wrote from her soul. When I wrote about him, that’s where I wrote from as well, but I had never heard an artist write from their soul and it actually come across in their music. Her music was sad, pure, true…life changing. I began to lock myself in my room listening to this album over and over. Before Maria Mena came about, the end of 2005 and beginning of 2006 consisted of me listening to nothing Alternative Rock and Atlanta-based music. The summer of 2006 consisted of me having this ridiculous fantasy that I could become a part of the writing groups “The Clutch”, “The Underdogs” or “The Write House”. I started taking a liking to how blunt Lily Allen was, because it reminded me of how blunt I had become over the past year. I liked James Blunt, Corinne Baily Rae, Aaradhna, Fund*mental ’03 (FDM). Overseas music began to slowly creep in, but not as much as it did when 2007 rolled around. When I first saw the ♪You Know I’m No Good♪ video on VH1 Soul. Amy Winehouse instantly became my favorite singer. I had pushed poor Amerie, Mya and Teedra Moses to the side. If it wasn’t about Maria Mena, then it was about Amy Winehouse. I was now 15 and so different than how I was when I was 14. 15 solidified the person that I created of myself, and I am still her. I had become extremely blunt; I didn’t care about what people thought at all anymore, I became extremely open as a person. I knew my dad didn’t like it. Sometimes I would re-write my songs if they were written too sloppy. I would throw away the old copy. My dad would sometimes read them and he told me he didn’t like how I wrote. He didn’t like what I wrote about and he didn’t like my language. In my head I said, “Fuck it. Eh”. I looked at love differently at 15. I came to the realization that the guy that I was in love with would not love me the way I loved it. I accepted it, sucked it up and said that I will only let myself fall out of love with him if his actions allowed it. Every time he did something that would hurt or angered me, I shrugged it off and figuratively would take back a piece of my heart from him. Amy Winehouse’s ♫Back To Back♫ CD chronicled us then, without me being a drug addict of course. So I wrote, I wrote, I wrote and I wrote. And he kept showing me that this would be over soon, but while he was around I still loved him and so I kept writing. Amy showed me that lyrics could get to the point. Lyrics could be simple and in your face and still come from the soul. Amy Winehouse (UK) and Maria Mena (Norway) helped me realize so much about songwriting.