Songs I Wrote in My Mid-Twenties

My attempts at writing like Bjork, Peter Gabriel, and Steely Dan.

Apr 04, 2024

This is part 2 of a series. To listen to the songs I wrote in my early twenties, click here.

Hiya!

I’m currently working through a little retrospective of music I’ve made in the last decade of my life. Last week I detailed songs I wrote when I was twenty-one and twenty-two. Now, I’m gonna shine a light on my mid-twenties, and how my songwriting changed.

In my mid-twenties I moved to London and took a year-long songwriting course. Naturally, you think “songwriting course” and think “that’s what makes you better at songwriting,” but I didn’t really find that to be the case! I want my money back!!!

What I mean is, I didn’t create better songs whilst I was studying songwriting. Instead of building on what I already had, it felt like I was moving sideways.

I was expanding out in all directions, trying different genres, different production techniques, different sounds. I leaned heavily into my influences and tried to write like them.

At this point in my life I approached my music with a greater emphasis on the pop genre. Was I a pop artist? This is what I tested out in my mid-twenties. I also leaned in harder to the visual aspects of being a musician: taking photos, making music videos, and building a visual world around my music. It involved a lot of flowers.

👶 The Baby Bump

I worked in a cafe for a while after living in Canada, and developed a crush on one of my older coworkers. He was happily partnered and had a baby on the way, and I came up with the idea of a song about falling for someone who was about to become a parent.

I distinctly remember this being the first song that I really tried when it came to the production. I wanted the song to sound big, and I still love the nightmare-church organ in the chorus that just kicks the door down when it arrives.

The chorus went, ‘cause you got another baby, and she got your baby! And yet you drive me craaazzyyy… ‘cause ya gotta rhyme ‘baby’ with ‘crazy’ if you’re writing a real pop song. Trust me on this I’m an expert. I would play this song with my friend Richard and he would always make me laugh by singing, in his Northern voice, “‘cause you got another baby, AND I’LL EAT YER BABY!”

1×

0:00

-3:45

I posted this song on Soundcloud and didn’t do much else with it, but one day I got a message that really struck my heart. It was from Jaime Brooks, also known as Default Genders, who was dating Grimes at the time. They had listened to the song and really loved it, and complimented me on the amount of love and effort I’d clearly put into my project. I really felt seen. Jaime even put it on an end-of-year mix posted to Tumblr, and described my song as ‘a lost 10,000 maniacs synthpop record produced by arthur baker in the 80’s and then locked into a vault until the present day.'

I think a part of me at that time was like, “I’VE MADE IT” because I got an online message from someone who I thought was really cool. I have since learned, many times over, that someone you admire liking your work doesn’t equate to overnight success. Still feels good, though. And I printed that initial message out and stuck it on my wall. It meant something.

🎲 Copycat

At this point in my life I was going through a period of learning, learning, learning. I studied songwriters I loved, read their interviews, watched Youtube videos of their concerts, made note of the artists they were inspired by.

My influences at the time were as follows:

Bjork. I was massively into Bjork and watched this concert multiple times. All is Full of Love was one of my favourite songs at the time (still is one of my favourites) and I just adored her wildness, individuality and creative control.
Grimes was also a big influence at this point. I would lap up everything she did, reading interviews with her about how she made her first album on Garageband. I thought, if she can do it, I can do it too.
K-Pop snuck into my psyche at this point too. I had been aware of k-pop since about 2012, but spending time on Tumblr it became inevitable that I would fall into a k-pop-hole (the right kind of k-hole) and never come back out again. My favourite group were EXO and my bias was Oh Sehun (your bias is your favourite member of a k-pop group). I was fascinated by the ways in which management companies like SM Entertainment were manufacturing perfect pop groups, and hacked the genre like it was a code to be cracked. I even wrote an essay about K-pop for my songwriting course.
Peter Gabriel. Peter Gabriel was a REVELATION to me, and deeply influenced my songwriting. I listened to ‘So’ on repeat, and watched his Secret World tour film, as well as his Athens performance.

I have a few songs which are very funny to listen to because, they are very clearly my attempts at being these three artists:

Bjork
Peter Gabriel
Steely Dan

In order to find your voice, you gotta try out other people’s.

These are all pretty good songs in their own right, but they weren’t Olivia songs. And I wasn’t 100% sure what an Olivia song was, yet. They were test-drives of other artists’ sounds, when I was trying to find my own.

👁️ Olivia Being Peter Gabriel

This song is called ‘Heathen’ and is about falling in love, after years of telling yourself that you don’t need anybody.

I did a few different demos of this song, but the straightforward piano in this one really lets the song breathe.

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-4:13

🦾 Olivia Being Bjork

‘Orpheus’ was a song in which I played with production a lot. There’s swelling violins, a weird zebra sound, LOTS of reverb, and clicky-clacky percussion.

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-3:12

🍹 Olivia Being Steely Dan

My friend Richard and I tasked ourselves with writing a Steely Dan song. The topic? Like any good Steely Dan song, the topic of the song is elusive, even to us. It is mostly nonsense about being at some sort of resort and asking your recluse friend to come.

Oh, and it’s called ‘West Coast Delight.’

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-4:29

In my mid-twenties I wrote in every direction, which was great thing because I learned a lot, but my songwriting felt anchorless. I was being told at college that I could write Americana, I could write pop, I could write Motown, I could write electro-pop, but I felt so stretched across the board, I wasn’t focused at all.

Eventually, due to a number of reasons, I stopped writing music altogether. Not by choice: I just literally couldn’t squeeze a song out, and the harder I tried, the worse it got. So when I was about twenty-six, I stopped making music. I knew I was taking a break but it was honestly heart-breaking, it was like ending a relationship with someone when you know you both love each other but it just isn’t working. It really was that painful.

Eventually, I started writing again.

But that’s a story for next week.

🎙 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…

Do you think, in order to learn something, you have to also un-learn it?
Who are your biggest influences? Your North Star artists?
Have you ever made something which is quite clearly a rip-off or imitation of an artists you admire?

a constellation

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