Young singer/songwriter has six songs on her first album
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
UPPER TOWNSHIP – Méabh Stanford was immersed in music before she could walk. She went to baby music classes when she was less than a year old. She started writing admittedly “pretty bad songs” when she was 7 or 8 years old and then got serious about the craft before she hit her teens.
With encouragement and contacts from her vocal coach, the Upper Township 16-year-old, a rising junior at Ocean City High School, took a much bigger step forward. She was in the studio in June and July with Grammy-nominated producer Saint Luke, laying down the vocals on the six songs she had written. She accompanied herself on guitar and keyboards, with Saint Luke adding “strings, percussion at some points, some of his own little piano parts, some sound effects like water or wind,” she said.
Less than two weeks ago, they were in the mixing and mastering stage and getting close to the finished product. “It’s really scary and exciting at the same time,” Stanford said.
This weekend, she is going to debut her very own six-song EP.
Stanford is having “a little release party” starting at 7 p.m. July 24 at the Piccolo Cafe on Landis Avenue in Vineland where she will perform her songs and people will be able to hear them as they are on the EP. The event will be live-streamed on Facebook Live, Instagram Live and YouTube Live.
Song inspirations: Literature, movies
Stanford is a voracious reader, the daughter of two teachers, Christine and Graig Stanford. Her EP contains a collection of songs she has written.
“I wasn’t writing songs with this project in mind, but I realized these songs all fit together,” she said. “The earliest song on this project is from when I was in eighth grade. The latest song is from this January. They have kind of come together. These all make sense to me to be a project together. They’ve all been inspired by books and movies and I thought they would be a great little package.”
The song she wrote in eighth grade came about when her class was reading “Romeo and Juliet.” She acknowledges so many good songs have been inspired by the Shakespeare classic. “I was too. It is titled, ‘I can still hope,’ and it’s more if Romeo had not fallen in love with Juliet. So, an unrequited love kind of twist.”
This past January she wrote a song she later split into two called “Oh Hyacinth” parts one and two.
It is about the Greek myth of Apollo and Hyacinth. “It’s really just a tragic story. Apollo falls in love with Hyacinth and throws a discus and it hits Hyacinth in the head because the wind god was jealous of their relationship. Apollo is at fault for Hyacinth’s death, but is he really at fault? It is very sad.”
Another of the songs on the EP is called “Kiera Knightly is Anna Karenina.”
“Believe it or not it is about the movie ‘Anna Karenina.’ I hadn’t read the book but I watched the movie over the summer. It was just amazing. I loved it so much. I thought the way it was directed, to amplify the dramatics that already were there, was so interesting,” she said.
The song “I Still Remember” is about the book “Kite Runner” written by Khaled Hosseini and the sixth song, called “Glory Days,” is from the vantage point of the character Billy Pilgrim from author Kurt Vonnegut’s book “Slaughterhouse Five.”
“Even though these songs aren’t written from my own experiences, that they’re from literature, it is confessional,” Stanford said, “because they might not be my own experiences but they are emotions that I felt from reading these books or watching these movies.” When asked to describe her songs, she used the term “theatrical” with “lots of ups and downs music wise.”
(Learn more about her songs and the release party at her website, meabhstanford.com.)
Early start to what may be a career
“I was always performing songs from ‘Hannah Montana’ or my favorite Disney movies when I was younger,” Stanford said. “I was always drawn to music as a kid. I’ve always been very musical.
“I started writing pretty bad songs when I was 7 or 8. I would be rhyming ‘you’ and ‘blue’ and that would be the entire song,” she laughed, “but I started getting serious about it when I was 12 years old when I started playing guitar and it was easier for me to craft songs.”
Around eighth grade, when she was about 13 or 14, she began to think this could be a career.
She had begun playing the flute in fifth grade and was in the Upper Township school band. She now plays the flute in the OCHS band and will be one of the band’s drum majors this fall. She is in the jazz band at OCHS, does Model U.N. and Junior States of America, which she describes as like a debate club.
With her interest in the classics and mythology, she learned to play the lyre on her own in addition to a number of other instruments, including piano.
As a quick aside, she noted she didn’t always want to go into music.
“When I was very little I told people I wanted to be a boxer,” she laughed. “I think the first job I really wanted was to be a ballerina, but I stopped dancing after a while. And then around middle school I wanted to be a psychologist, but now even though I am getting into the music industry, I still want to go to school. I want to study classics and archaeology.”
Her parents have always been supportive of whatever she wants to do.
“No matter what my dreams were, they were there to guide me along. They are both teachers so they stress education and the importance of it. That emphasis on learning has helped me with songwriting,” she said.
Her vocal coach, Stevi Leigh, of Total Package Talent Development, challenged her to write a song at their first lesson four years ago, when Stanford was 12.
“I have a gift for spotting special gifts and talents and at 12 years of age I challenged Méabh Stanford to go home and write a song,” Leigh said. “I did not expect her to return with a complete and total body of work. It was in that very moment I knew she was a true songwriter. I witnessed her perseverance week to week as she responded well to direction, I always knew she had practiced for she would improve vocally during every lesson. She showed promise as the songs just kept coming.”
“I put myself to the work. It wound up being a pretty good first official song. Since then I started taking it a lot more seriously. She has been guiding me through song-writing,” Stanford said. Leigh, she said, “really helped me figure out this was something I was good at, something I should practice at and put more work into.” Leigh used her contacts to put her in touch with Saint Luke.
“It was really her who helped me figure out songwriting wasn’t just something I should do for fun,” Stanford said, “and maybe I should make something out of it.”
“I believe in Méabh and predict she will be a voice of her generation as she has a strong backbone, an incredible support system and has raised the bar for songwriters everywhere,” Leigh said. “As a singer-songwriter myself I have experience being critically picked apart since an early age through the entertainment and music industry, that is why I started Total Package Performance and Talent Development to instill strong confidence in self, dignity and honor through a moral ladder and the power to choose in each one of my students. Méabh Stanford was my first student when I opened in New Jersey and I am proud of her for setting the bar high. She is going to go on to do great things for this world.”
In the studio
As Stanford’s songwriting blossomed, Leigh thought she would collaborate well with Saint Luke.
“She thought we would be a good fit creative process wise. Through her is how most of that happened,” Stanford said.
With her six songs already written, once in the studio her job was to lay down the vocals.
“Once I laid down my vocals and they were mixed, Luke got to work on the production and I let him know, ‘I like that,’ ‘I don’t like that.’ Or maybe we can fix something. Now they’ve all been produced,” she said.
Although young and inexperienced with being in a studio, Stanford said she stuck up for herself.
“I think for my first time in a studio I made sure that people heard my voice,” she said. “I know what I want so I made sure I got what I want. At the end of the day they are my songs and I don’t want to look back 10 or 20 years from now” and think someone else was making all the decisions.
Far ahead
Stanford doesn’t know where music will take her after her EP’s release.
Her future remains up in the air, but she plans to pursue more than one option.
“I don’t know how successful this is going to be or if it is going to be successful at all,” Stanford said. “I’m not banking on this being my career. I am interested in the classics and archaeology and I do think I would like to become an archaeologist at some point.
“I’ve joked that I’ll be the first person on Wikipedia that is singer/archaeologist,” she laughs.
“I honestly would be fine with either path. If this does become successful I think I could find a way to make it work. They are both my passions.”