Songs I Wrote in my Early Twenties

The songs I wrote in my twenties read like cryptic diary entries. They cite events such as walking down Runnymede Road in the snow, making coffee for a chef I worked with at a French restaurant...

This is part 1 of a series.

It’s a common illusion that artists, musicians, poets, writers emerge from a hatched egg with all the skills and taste they need to create the perfect piece of art.

It’s not true, but sometimes it feels like that.

As a thirty-two….three??? thirty-two? year-old woman, I can say that listening to emerging talent on BBC Radio 1 feels like a personal attack, as song after song presents a freshly-minted popstar who you just know is only a few years out of their Heinemann textbooks.

I don’t know about you, but I took a WHILE to get to where I am today with my songwriting. When people preface a song with, ‘this is the first song I ever wrote,’ I think, you liar!!! Who truly writes a good song the first time around?!

The chorus for the first song I ever wrote went like this: ‘snip, snip, snip… snip awayyyy’ The song was a lament for getting cut out of a friend’s social circle, but also could have doubled as a jingle for neutering your rottweiler.

The point I’m making is this: my early songs were passionate, but not that good. And I believe that most people’s first artworks fall into this category.

Often I go back to my old catalogue, when I started writing songs under the moniker INKA. This was about five years after the snip snip song.

I listen to these songs of my early twenties, prepared to scoff at the little spring chicken of talent I had, still needing to be fostered, still needing to cut its teeth, still needing to grow. But I always get surprised at the little magical something there, something that I find myself now trying to chase and pin down, and bring back into the songs I write today.

So, with reverence for my younger self, I’m gonna share with you some music I made before I chose my own name, pulled up my big girl pants and recorded music in a studio.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Songs I Wrote in Scotland

Something went off in my brain in 2013, and I made a solid decision to start recording music in my bedroom in my fourth-floor flat in Edinburgh. I bought a little keyboard and downloaded some music production software.

With great power comes great responsibility. The very first thing I ever made was a techno cover of Simply Red’s ‘Home.’

I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

I lived in a flat with 4 of my friends and a piano, which I loved (my flatmates loved the piano… not so much, especially around exam time). At the time I had my Dad’s record collection, complete with Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison, and even though a part of me thought I was writing songs in their style, I was definitely not. But my songs had a naive charm to them, as I plinky-plonked on the upright piano in the living room, struggling to keep time.

I recorded a bunch of songs and didn’t realise I had to change my microphone’s input from ‘stereo’ to ‘mono’, which gave all the songs a tinny, faraway feeling. I wrote the lyric ‘confessing I’m over ya under magnolia trees’ because I loved the magnolias in Edinburgh and I really wanted to get the word magnolia into a song, and it became a song called ‘Weathervane.’ These songs were the first ones I ever put on the internet, if you discount the Simply Red cover, which I think we shall.

I still like the opening line of the chorus: ‘I feel I’m walking on a weathervane.’

After university I worked in a restaurant in Albyn and started a blog about working in this restaurant, ahead of my move to Canada. It was run by a wealthy man who kept annoying his staff by treating the menu like his own personal list of favourite foods. At the weekend the tables were cleared at a certain hour and the clientele of forty and fifty-year olds on their nights out swarmed the dancefloor. I would stand in the back and polish the cutlery, humming along to Billy Ocean or whatever they were blasting out front.

It was a funny old place, and was my first real experience working in hospitality. I’d had a job at an ice cream shop, but after Christmas Party Season at the restaurant, I realised that I hadn’t even known I was born, back when I was slinging Cream of Galloway.

I wrote a few songs about my time waitressing in the restaurant, including jingles about men travelling for business, heathens mixing ketchup with their mayo, and this experience:

🇨🇦 Songs I Wrote in Toronto

I went to Brighton last weekend to meet my friend James for a coffee, which turned into a coffee, then a tea, then lunch, then a pint. As we bounced from place to place, getting adequately fed and watered, we talked about everything from religion to the ocean to monkeys to the state of the music industry today. Every so often, something he said would prompt me to start a sentence with, “when I was in Canada…”

Now. It’s been ten years since I moved to Canada. And I was only there for a year — twelve months bookended by flights and snow.

Canada is an event I will forever reference because, even though it was only a year of my life, it was a year so potent, so different, that it outshines other years in my life. It wasn’t the best year, it wasn’t the worst year. But it was the year I was furthest from home, and it was the year I wrote the most songs.

At the age of 22, in Toronto, my favourite way to write and record songs was to sit on my bedroom floor, hunched over like Gollum debating with himself about whether or not to kill Frodo. I had a microphone which stood on a little stand that plugged straight into my computer via USB, and a MIDI keyboard which was only two octaves long.

I made four collections of songs during my time in Canada, the first aptly titled ‘sadgirls.’ This was a time in my life where I was yet to make solid friends in the city, instead clinging on to one pal I’d made through a Tinder date. As the snow melted and the weather began to change I literally felt myself transforming, too. The song ‘Blossom’ was about that feeling, including lyrics such as ‘am I decomposing, or am I just changing?’

The songs I wrote in my twenties read like cryptic diary entries. They cite events such as walking down Runnymede Road in the snow, making coffee for a chef I worked with at a French restaurant, even a song about the Ebola scare of 2014 (ebola??? who writes songs about EBOLA???). They don’t have the mass appeal of pop songs written with radio in mind, but I love these songs for this reason. They document my life.

One of my favourite songs from this period is called ‘REM Sleep’, which was written after I had a romantic dream about someone I worked with who I hadn’t ever looked twice at. The refrain is, ‘and then I woke up: what the fuck?’ which I believe is an emotion that most of us can relate to after a dream which defies the limits of even our most subconscious tastes.

Next week I’ll be back with songs from my mid-twenties, where I flexed my productions skills a little more, ran around making music videos in Edinburgh and got a surprising message from an artist I admired.

🎙 Upcoming Gigs

I’m playing London and Glasgow in April! Get your tickets now:

• London, 11th April: Stories in Song, @ The Green Note | Buy tickets

• Glasgow, 27th April: With Fergus McNeill, @ The Dream Machine | Buy Tickets

✍️ JOIN ME IN THE COMMENTS…

1. What was your early music/writing/artwork/poetry/etc like? Was it pretty good or do you cringe to think about it?

2. Did you have a restaurant job when you were in your twenties? What was the best/worst thing about it?

3. Did you live abroad for a while when you were in your twenties? Was it all it cracked up to be?

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Til next time! Be good,

Olivia 🌈✨🏔🎶