The next piece of the puzzle was writing.
I did not have much interest in school. I had interest in some classes, especially history and any kind of writing class, but a lot of the time I was bored.
When I was probably in middle school, maybe seventh or eighth grade, I was so bored in school that I just started writing on paper. I could not really do anything else because the teacher would know if we were playing around, so I had to write.
So I started writing in notebooks.
I had lots of big three-ring binders full of writing and poetry. At first, my writing was kind of like automatic writing. Basically, I would just put down on paper whatever was coming through my mind.
Then it started to turn into ideas, and those ideas started to turn into poetry.
So I had hundreds, maybe even thousands, of writings and poems. I never in a million years imagined putting any of that to the piano. The piano, to me, was just a relief. It was where the creative musical thing inside of me could come out.
I would come home from school, open the door, walk straight to the piano, and start pounding out things on the piano.
Music was emotional to me before it was technical. The feeling came first. A sound would carry something, and later the words would try to explain what the sound already seemed to know.
That is probably how my songs have almost always worked. The music usually came before the lyrics. The emotion came first, and then the words came later.
After I picked up the guitar, that started to change the writing. The guitar gave my hands a new place to go. It gave me chords. It gave me something I could carry around. It gave me a way to take the poetry and begin turning it into songs.
At first, I was learning other people’s songs. That is how almost everybody starts. You learn the chords. You copy the pattern. You try to sing along. You try to make your version sound something like the song you heard.
But eventually, when you sit with a guitar long enough, your hands start finding little changes. A chord rings a certain way. A rhythm feels different. A line comes into your mind. You start wondering what would happen if you put your own words over your own chord changes.
That is when the guitar started becoming a doorway for me.
I started putting my poetry ability to music.
I think I was in tenth grade. I had written a song, and I was with a girlfriend. I do not even remember who she was. I had a poem that I had put to music, and I said, “Here, I want you to come listen to this song. Here are the lyrics.”
So I played the song, and she was reading the poem.
Then she said, “Well, aren’t you going to sing?”
I said, “No, I can’t sing and play at the same time.”
And she said, “Why don’t you practice?”
That was kind of like a revelation to me. It just hit me.
So I started to practice, and little by little I was able to play and sing at the same time.
That was another part of the story. The piano had been there. The guitar had come in. The writing had been happening in notebooks for years. Then those things started to come together.
I was writing poems, making music, learning guitar, and slowly learning how to sing and play at the same time.
That is when poetry started becoming song lyrics.
Read Chapter 3: Classical and Rock Influences — The Story of Ailie Mae