SoB: It sounds like you’ve had quite a journey of inspiration so far. Can you tell us a bit about what your journey has looked like from Summerside to Toronto and now, Nashville? What was that process like? AW: I went to Toronto, and I didn’t know a single person in the music industry. Within a year, I was working in a bar, and I was introduced to my now-husband, who at the time was retiring from being a touring drummer. The person who introduced us told him I needed help, so he took me under his wing and started co-writing with me (he’s a songwriter, too) and working with different people to co-write. He saw that I was pretty green and needed a lot of development and experience within the industry so we formed a cover band, and we played every little dive bar in Ontario, at Legions, weddings, Ribfests – wherever we could get on stage. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that experience was invaluable. It’s not fun playing in front of a bunch of drunken people or people who really aren’t listening to you as you are just the background noise. That being said, I learned hours of material, I learned how other people wrote, how to co-write songs, how to perform, what to do when no one is listening, what to do when the mic stops working, and so on. We did that for ten years until I started playing my own, original music. My husband knew one guy in Nashville so I went down when I was 20 or 21 and started working with him, co-writing, and he would hook me up with other writers to work with to develop my writing skills. I learned how to record in a studio. And he gave me great advice: “You only get one first impression.” I’ve taken that
Photo Credit - PJ Brown
advice seriously. I had a lot of development to do that I didn’t want to do in the public eye of Nashville. Once you build these relationships, they remember you at that level. At 20, I was inexperienced, I wasn’t necessarily the best singer, and so I wanted to do all of that development under a cover band name, not putting myself out there until I was ready, but at the same time as I was performing under the cover band, I was coming to Nashville to write. It was a different experience in Nashville for me back then – I would go down for two weeks at a time, get hotels and drive or fly down and have all of these writing sessions booked and literally every one of them would be canceled because those writers weren’t interested in spending their time writing with someone who wasn’t putting music out. I was a “nobody” then. I got a lot of “nos” and “not yets”. But now, getting to come down and write with incredible people who have so much experience, and who’ve written Number One songs is so amazing. It was hard back then to always hear “no” but it’s also so cool to have gone from that experience to where I am now.
Photo Credit - PJ Brown
16 SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • VOL 24 ISSUE 2
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