“It’s not too different from when you make a playlist for...

“It’s not too different from when you make a playlist for someone you love. Every lyric, every note, you wanted them to hear. You wanted them to know something. It’s a deep thing. If you tried to say it, it’d be excruciating. But you want them to feel it. It’s the same when you’re writing a song. The first song I ever wrote was in this park. I was thirteen. It was me and two other girls. We jumped the fence and sat on the grass and wrote in the sunshine. We made a rule that we wouldn’t write about boys, so the song was called: Not To Write About Boys. We thought it turned out awesome. And two days later we played our first show in this same park. I couldn’t play for shit back then, but I never looked back. Music gave me this mountain to climb that didn’t have a limit. Some years I’d spend almost 200 days on the road. I got to headline Webster Hall last year with my current band; it was a huge highlight of my life. Writing a song feels a little different now; it can be easy to get caught up in the pressure: the deadlines, the expectations, what people think. One wrong word and it becomes too cheesy, or too cool. The only way I know how to do it is to write for the fan in myself. That’s my compass. There’s a songwriter in me that writes the song, but I listen as a fan. Both parts have to weigh in, but the fan gets the final vote. When the fan inside me says: ‘I get that. I feel that. It makes me so fucking happy.’ Then I know I finally got it. That’s when I know it’s done.”