The Ten-Year Overnight Success
A profile of the songwriter whose breakout record was, by her own count, the fourteenth she had tried to make.
She keeps the rejected albums in a closet, thirteen hard drives in a shoebox, each labeled with a date and a one-word verdict: "no," "close," "almost," and, on the drive from four years ago, just a question mark. The fourteenth attempt is the one that finally got made, got released, and got her a slot at three festivals this summer — a fact she finds both gratifying and a little absurd, given that by her account it was not obviously better than the others.
"I used to think there was a version of a song that was correct, and my job was to find it," she says, curled into a studio couch that has seen better decades. "What changed is I stopped looking for correct and started looking for true. Those are not the same thing, and nobody tells you that when you start." The distinction shows up across the record in small, deliberate imperfections — a vocal take with an audible breath mid-line that a producer wanted to edit out and she refused to lose, a bridge that resolves to the wrong chord on purpose because the right one, she says, "sounded like it was lying."
The decade of failed attempts was not wasted time, even if it did not feel that way at the time. Early drafts of songs that never made an album reappear here transformed almost beyond recognition — a breakup song written at twenty-two about a relationship that barely lasted a summer becomes, at thirty-two, a song about the version of herself who wrote it, sung with enough distance to be forgiving. "I do not think I could have written this record without the twenty-two-year-old's draft," she says. "I just needed a decade to figure out what she was actually trying to say."
What is striking, talking to her, is the complete absence of bitterness about the years it took. Industry rejection stories usually come with an edge — a list of executives who were wrong, a settling of scores. Hers does not. "Every one of those thirteen records was made by someone who was not ready yet," she says. "I am grateful they said no. I would not want anyone to have heard those." Asked whether she thinks the fourteenth is the one, finally, that says what she means, she pauses for a long moment. "Ask me in ten years."