The vision I had before I even did any of this was I saw myself sitting in a cabin—and all around me, all the walls, the tables, the floors, the couches and chairs, were covered with white pieces of paper. On each piece of paper there was a story. When I first got to the cabin and I started getting these buckets of stories, I started putting them on the floor. Then I started thinking, “OK, that’s a bad idea; this is chaos.”
It’s like an artist. When an artist creates, it might look like a mess until there’s a finished product. That was a bit of the chaos for me that I knew what I was doing, but somebody else would look and go, “What is going on in here?” I would put some stories in folders that sort of they had similar themes. What that did is it helped me realize what are some more common themes that I’m surprised are being represented here. But it let me know these are topics that I can’t turn away from. If I’m going to be true to this project, whether I like it or not, I need to write a song about this.
I’ve never been so excited about a project, and ironically it’s a record that has nothing to do with me. Well, I shouldn’t say it doesn’t have anything to do with me, because the truth is I connected with the stories. In some way, I found myself in a lot of the stories. Thanks to the people that sent me their stories. For me as a songwriter, they allowed me a window to be able to write a song about something that I’ve never experienced.
In the first 1,000 stories, 250 stories were from women sharing with me how they had been victims of sexual abuse. There were women in their 40s saying, “I was abused as a child by such and such person. And I’m still dealing with that guilt in my life.” And I’m thinking, “How am I going to write a song about this?” But I did. I wrote a song called “Broken Girl”. Anybody who sent me their story that dealt with the topic of abuse, that’s their song.
Broken Girl by Matthew West
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