Musical Thoughts on Turning 50
by Batya Diamond of BatyaDiamond.com
Watching my daughter grow up–she’s sixteen now–has been quite an inspiration to me, and quite nostalgic. Taylor Swift’s “Fifteen” came out when Annie was fifteen, so of course it made me think of her. But during that time I was also headed towards fifty, thinking a lot about that number and really taking stock of my life. Part of my recent journey has been working towards establishing myself as a songwriter. One day it struck me, as I was listening to Swift’s song–or maybe watching her sweet video–how well the word “fifty” fit in the title spot. I decided to write the rest of the song.
The writing and the entire project unfolded pretty quickly. I listened to Swift over and over, and found lines that resonated with me–me, the young girl and me the ‘wise woman’–trying to be as faithful as I could to her tone while offering a commentary on the road from young womanhood to maturity. I shared my early drafts with my songwriting coach, Alex, and a couple of other writers (one of them, Lisa, sings on the recording). We are all ’women of a certain age’. I used a karaoke track for music to write along to and worked the lyric for about three weeks until all the lines fell into place.
When the writing was close to done, Lisa and I arranged a vocal recording date with our producer/engineer John; I started on ideas for the video. I got in touch with Susan–the video producer–and sent her ideas of how I wanted it to look, while soliciting photos from friends and family (I asked them to send me pix of them ‘being 50′). Their support was terrific! Lisa, Jim and I went into the recording studio Wednesday, Susan started on the video on Thursday, and by Friday night the project was up on YouTube.
You can see it here:
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