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Songwriting Session

Songwriting Session with Sarah Aili

Sarah Aili

Songwriting Session is a new weekly column that goes behind-the-scenes with artists and songwriters. Each Sunday, a new songwriter will share their journey and provide lessons they’ve learned along the way. This week, Sarah Aili shares what she has learned as a songwriter.

 

Music runs in the family for singer-songwriter Sarah Aili, who moved to Nashville nearly two years ago after living in New York and California.

“I grew up in the theater,” Sarah says over a cappuccino at East Nashville’s Ugly Mugs. “My grandmother was a singer. She grew up in New York City and she taught me to sing when I was really young. I always heard her stories about New York and being in shows so I did that because I fell in love with her and the whole thing.”

From an early age, Sarah took piano, dance and vocal lessons and was involved in community theater and musical theater. Once she hit high school she found herself in the lead roles of her school musicals and the fire of being on Broadway was lit. It wasn’t forever, though.

“My uncle who’s in the music business gave me my first guitar at 14 and he said, ‘You’re a songwriter, but you don’t know it yet,'” she recalls with a smile. “He’s always been a huge support and comrade in music for me.”

Once she got to college, Sarah began co-writing when a production house was interested in her and signed her. Things went fast and at 21 she performed her first big show at a festival at The Warfield, San Francisco’s historic rock venue which had acts like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin perform years prior. It freaked her out so she took a break from music for a few years, eventually moving to New York to pursue theater again full-time.

“I don’t think I was ready for whatever reason,” she admits.

Fast forward years later. Sarah’s living in Brooklyn and acting but once again gets the music bug. She recorded two EPs by the time she meets Grammy nominated singer-songwriter Amanda Williams, who urges her to get involved in a songwriting program she was running which eventually took Sarah to Nashville.

“It was amazing,” she says of her first experience in Nashville. “That was the first time I stepped into the music business with songwriting. That weekend, Amanda gave out three awards and I received the 2nd place award for most original songwriting which got me a meeting with a publisher and record label, a recording session and a photo session. All of the sudden, Nashville was on my radar. I must have heard, “you oughta move to Nashville a dozen times that weekend. So I opened myself up to the universe. I was living in Brooklyn at the time and I thought, ‘I will listen for the signs.'”

Three months later, those signs spoke loudly and Sarah found herself driving cross country to move to Nashville in January of 2014. Her move was prompted by the desire to learn the craft of songwriting. Since then she’s written over 100 songs, 11 of which appear on her new album Sessions which was released yesterday (Dec. 12).

“I co-wrote every day and worked the muscle. The first year [in Nashville] I wrote and this last year was about being in the studio and it’s been awesome. Playing shows, seeing what the business is about, having meetings with publishers. I’m still independent and looking at the idea of maybe a publishing deal.”

So what’s Sarah’s advice to aspiring songwriters?

“I’ve always heard, just write. Write, write, write. It’s so true. It’s like going to the gym,” she explains. “The blocks that I had before when I moved here a year and a half ago, I don’t have those blocks anymore. I know that I will always be writing. It’s just write, write, write. It’s like building a muscle and learning yourself how you want to speak and how to be honest.”

She adds: “It’s about finding your strength and letting that lead everything else. My voice is what led me to songwriting and led me to the stage and to dance even and the people I know. I think that’s the most important thing.”

Sarah says every song on her new album is “truthful and meaningful and written with people I love and adore.” One of those songs is the powerful “Arsonist” which is about her last relationship.

“When we broke up there was a lot of juice to fuel my songwriting. A lot of the songs on the album are inspired by this particular emotional journey,” she explains. “What I love about music is you can go into an emotion fully and create a world out of it and move from it and keep on moving in your life but that moment is captured within a song. It’s defining but we all change. It hurt and felt like a major, major burn. But at the same time with fire, when something burns down something else is built from that.”

Sarah says that revealing so much of herself in her music is a welcomed change from her musical theater days. No longer is she hiding behind someone else’s words. Instead, she’s speaking her own truth.

“It was scary at first to be so honest but I can never not write honestly. My relationships with people are honest. I’m a thinker and a feeler. I don’t know how to make myself other than that because music is from the heart and that’s a step that helps us through,” she says.

By Sarah allowing herself to be so honest in her songwriting, she often has fans share their stories with her. One song in particular is “Vacancy,” which she wrote about her brother’s addiction.

“People who’ve heard it I’ve had conversations about their family members. That’s the stuff that really moves me. I share the human condition and connecting at the heart and connecting at the mind,” she says. “Music is amazing. There are some things you cannot say, but when you say them in a song for three to four minutes you don’t have to say anything, you just feel. I hope to make music like that.”

“I like when songs do something,” she continues. “There’s something to be said of songs on the radio that make you feel good. Look at the Adele record, it slays me. It makes me feel.”

Before our chat comes to a close, Sarah explains that there’s often a stigma about people coming over from the theater world into the music world but there shouldn’t be. She says her background in theater has only helped her become a better artist.

“I studied storytelling for a long time so when I write a song, I see the music video in my head like a scene in a play and that helps me tell the story. Also, in a performance, the talking between the songs, I love talking to an audience. I’m used to being onstage looking at the audience and doing my thing. I love seeing artists being personal with their audience. You gotta love what you’re doing because it’s going to be a long road if you don’t.”

Sarah Aili’s new album Sessions is available on iTunes.