Once I started playing I tried my hand at songwriting and my dad bought me a little recorder and I put some songs down. I wouldn’t play them for anyone but he (her dad) of course sunk into my room and listened to them anyway, which is just what fathers do I guess (giggles). He convinced me to let him to let him record them better and give them to some people to see what they thought. They got an awesome response even though these were crappy little demos. And that is kind of how we got the ball rolling.

How old were you when all this happened?

15. Yeah, so it was crazy it all happened really fast for me. I didn’t even have anything professionally recorded yet so we went and did something that sounded a little more professional. A little five song EP that I would sell at shows and stuff. Things happened really fast, I didn’t even have a chance to play much outside Cleveland or the Midwest before I had labels calling.

I didn’t end up signing the record deal that I wanted until I was 19. I think that was the best choice I ever made because it gave me a chance to grow as an artist and really decide who I was as a musician before I put a record out. I think that if I had signed a deal when I was 16 it would have been very easy for me to be moulded into something that I didn’t necessarily want to be.

So did you write all the songs on Don’t Look Away? Do you write all of your music, or just the lyrics?

I write everything for the most part; everything on my record is mine. The only stuff that isn’t I’ve co-written with somebody. It all has something that I have written in it. As of yet I haven’t recorded anything that isn’t original. Which is cool to me because I think, there’s some amazing songs that I would love to cover out there, to release my own version. But it’s awesome to write your own music, you can sing it with so much more heart. If it’s something you wrote then it was obviously something that you were feeling, that was going on in your life.

I really write to deal with things that are going on in my life. It’s so therapeutic for me and at the same time I think it’s cool that therapeutic for other people too. No matter what the situation they can relate to it and that is all that matters to me.