The Story of ‘Sweet’

Congratulations! You have passed through the Magical Strawberry Portal and arrived, mostly unscathed, into the Sweet Realm, where it’s pretty much just another page of my website, but I’m going to tell you a story about my song, ‘Sweet.’

Sweet was not the first song I wrote, but it might as well have been. I was at my house with my Lover and a Friend. It was New Year’s Day, 2024, and the three of us had discussed music and making music for much of the previous night. We ate buttery steak and perfectly cooked salmon and (was it homemade? I can’t remember) delicious, delicious pasta, aglio e olio style, and we listened to Taylor Swift and talked about songwriting and production and whether I thought I could, essentially, be a session songwriter. I said I thought I could.

This was not entirely random. Friend and I had recorded a song together many years before, and, though it didn’t go anywhere, that process lit an ember in me that would steadily, silently grow over the following years.

Cut back to Jan 1, 2024. Friend pulls up a beat he’s been working on, and we sit there for a while trying to come up with a concept and some lyrics. We giggle and tinker, but we don’t land on anything that’s exciting to either one of us. It doesn’t matter. These few minutes have been all the tinder my soul needed to turn that little songwriting ember into a roaring flame.

I have to go to the grocery store, and the boys are gonna go play golf or something. In the car, I feel I have something to prove. I have to write a song now. A song that comes only from me, that only I have to decide is good, worthy, finished. And I’m gonna have so much fun writing it all by myself!!

And it really went just like that. I drove to the grocery store, talking and humming to myself until the spark of an idea presented herself to me. She was bright, shiny, juicy, pop-y, a little sinister.

I fell in love with her instantly, but took my time getting to know her, patiently teasing out phrases to discover whether or not they might belong to her, and feeling an electric shock of excitement course through my body each time a new line clicked into place.

I got acquainted with the idea behind Sweet in that first drive to and from the grocery store, and the full song was written in little spurts over the next four days. I still have all those original voice notes, documentation of the messy process of me working it out, pulling at the threads of inspiration until the whole song had unraveled into this reality, with me as her awe-struck steward.

That was when it all started in earnest for me. I can’t tell you how I knew, but I knew I had something special with that song. And I knew that, if I kept feeding the fire of songwriting, it might keep feeding me right back.

Listen to ‘Sweet’ wherever you listen to music, and please send it to a friend if you like it <3

Thanks for reading.

xo Sarah