My Songbook (and other music related things)

How I Began Writing Songs

I've been making up silly little songs for as long as I can remember. Every now and then I remember words I sang as songs when I was in elementary, either swinging during recess, walking around the county fair, or just saying what I was doing at that moment in time in childish song form.

If my memory is correct, the first song I ever wrote down on paper was about my nursing home pen pal I got in 3rd grade. I wrote it in 4th grade. I and two of my friends at that time wanted to be a band so I tried writing songs for us. I did get a few down and sometimes we sang them at recess. I had fights with one of the girls in the band over the next year or so, and the 'band' was over.

In 5th grade, during music class, we were learning how to write a song and the teacher introduced us to garageband. During the class time for the next few weeks, we were supposed to create a song. One of my friends discovered the garageband loops and I used them to create my songs. I made three total and we were able to put them on CDs to keep. We had to give a title and make a cover for our albums and I went with (don't ask me why) 'Outrageous Yellow and the Primary Colors.'

That summer after 5th grade, I really started my songwriting, or at least my lyric writing. Using Garageband loops at home, I wrote and recorded my very first song, called "I'm Just Me." It sounded awesome at the time but I'll tell you, it's a disaster... It was the start of this all though so that disaster was worth it.

Over time throughout middle school, I wrote several songs, some of which only ever existed on papers. Others were turned into actual tracks with garageband. Some of those songs I recall being called "Revenge" and "Today" (but you've seen the lyrics to that one. I knew how to play piano at the time, but I couldn't write an instrumental to save my life.

In 7th grade, one of my Hunger Games obsessed friends and I started a band called The Mockingjays. We wrote a song called "I Don't Know" and posted it on YouTube (but I took it down a couple years ago). People in school watched it and for awhile they were walking through the halls singing the lyrics. I knew they were making fun of us but at the time I didn't care. It was kind of cool to hear people singing your own song.

I wrote the chorus to Fly at that time, originally thinking it would become The Mockingjay's next single. That never happened.

2012-2013 rolled around; I was a freshman in high school. I became much closer to one of my friends as we bonded over our love of One Direction. (We had been friends for years before but our friendship grew stronger this year.) Both of us were obsessed with music in general and one day she suggested that we start a band. Out of all the 'bands' I've been a part of in my life, this was the first one that actually went somewhere. We both knew piano and both wanted to learn guitar. (That summer I took guitar lessons and then taught her a few of the basics. After that we both just figured out the rest on our own.) She came to my house one day and we wrote our first (and currently only) single, Mirror Image (which I posted earlier in this book). (It was the first song I recorded on garageband with an instrumental I actually created. After that, I stopped using loops to make my backing track.). We started a YouTube channel called KayleeTheBand and have posted covers and a couple random videos on it.

I've been writing songs since then with the intention of us recording our next song sometime, but it hasn't happened yet. Our lives got busy and we had conflicting schedules as do most high school students, so instead of waiting to find a time to work on music with her, I continued with my songs alone. This was the end of last school year.

Last summer, I worked hard on writing songs with instrumentals, recording them, and trying to improve my skills. I have recordings on my computer of most of the songs I've posted in the book but all of them sound horrible (unless they've been rerecorded and posted on here).

At the end of summer camp this year, I started writing songs for my friends specifically because I discovered something awful that happened to one of my best friends when she was little. You know the back stories to these songs already so I don't need to explain all that again here, but that's pretty much where I am now. I've written my best songs just this past school year and then I decided to start a songbook on Wattpad to share the lyrics.

This has basically been my songwriting autobiography. If you're a songwriter too, share what you have. I've gained so much more confidence since I started this book than I ever had before. If you have something to say, say it. It's not worth locking it away.