Vancouver pop singer/songwriter Cassidy Mackenzie has spent the vast majority of her young life honing her craft as a musician, vocalist and composer of memorable melodies. Currently a student at Nashville’s prestigious Belmont University, where she is enrolled in the school’s contemporary songwriting program, she has combined her studies with work in the studio, recording music for her debut EP, One Look, set to be released this spring.
To lead into the record, the delightfully infectious single, Wish, is being released on Feb. 22.
The forthcoming EP was co-written and produced by veteran Vancouver-based producer/songwriter Ryan Stewart, best known for his work with Carly Rae Jepson, Owl City, Simple Plan and more. Although a neophyte to the music business, with no commercial track record to speak of, Mackenzie took the ‘it can’t hurt to ask’ approach and sought out Stewart to see if he would be interested in collaborating with her.
“It was actually really random, and it seems like a dream still and I don’t really understand how it happened. I came home for the summer and I wanted to work on music, and I wanted to work on it in Vancouver. I have idolized Ryan my whole life and always listened to the stuff that he worked on, so I knew who he was. And I found his email and I just sent him an email out of the blue saying, ‘hi my name is Cassidy, this is my music, would you be interested in working with me,’ not even expecting a response. And he replied and said, ‘I love your music and I would love to work with you.’ And we were in the studio the very next month,” she said, a hint of amazement still in her voice.
“I was actually shocked with how well he treated me. He never once treated me like I was anything less than him. It was really, really awesome to work with him. He brought everything I suggested into the process and the amount of mutual respect was amazing. We clicked so well creatively which allowed the process to be super exciting and really easy.
“And he brought out the best in me. Everything that we did, from the writing to the recording of the vocals, he would really push me to do my best. I remember once during the recording being surprised at what I could do. It was like ‘oh my God, I didn’t know that my voice could do that.’ So, he would encourage me to stretch and to try different things. He saw something in me that I really didn’t know I could do, which was a great experience and really boosted my confidence.”
The single Wish is a good example of the collaboration between Mackenzie and Stewart paying wonderfully melodic dividends.
“It was actually the fifth song that we worked on. We came in one day for one of our normal days of writing and he just asked what was going on in my life, what did I want to write about today. And I told him about this story that happened to me literally the night before. We just took it from there and created a song. That’s pretty much how all the songs on the EP happened. I would come in with an idea from an experience that I was going through, because I wanted all the songs to be real and honest, and we would just work from there,” Mackenzie explained.
“Usually we did the melody first and sometimes Ryan would already have a beat idea or chord progression that he was loving just from his working. With Wish the story came first that we wanted to tell and then the melody and then the actual lyrics before we filled in the rest. Wish is a story about falling for someone who is in a relationship and so badly not wanting to feel that way about them, but not being able to get that person out of your head. The night before I wrote it, I was playing in a bar in downtown Nashville and I met this guy and we were talking for hours and I was great and I totally fell for him, which never happens.
“Then he said, ‘this totally sucks because I really like you, but I have a girlfriend.’ And I was like ‘Oh God!’ But when I got home, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I think some of the things that I said actually made it into the song, they were so specific to that experience.”
From an early age, Mackenzie found that the best way to process her thoughts and emotions, the good and the bad, was by expressing them through music in one form or another.
“Before I ever took songwriting as a career path I would write. I would do that in high school and even in middle school. That’s how I got over the middle school heartbreaks and high school heartbreaks – I would write about it, and then think after, ‘that was a good therapy session.’ It’s totally why I started writing,” she explained.
“And to this day I hardly ever write songs that aren’t based on something that I am going through. I like to write about those things because it usually seems to create the best songs. Especially on this EP there is a lot of heartbreak expressed, but I am kind of weird in that I love heartbreak as a concept.”
As a kid, Mackenzie was enamoured with the work of Avril Lavigne, as well as Taylor Swift. She said even before she understood the mechanics of songwriting, she would use their songs as templates to create her own.
“More recently I have come to love The 1975 and Halsey and stuff like that, songs that sort of have an intense vibe to them. When we were deciding on the sounds and the tone I wanted to use on the EP, I would use The 1975 as a reference because I loved their guitar parts and loved their beats,” she said.
Mackenzie’s grandfather put her in violin lessons at age four, before she shifted to guitar a couple of years later. The family moved to New Zealand for a short while when Cassidy was seven years old, and it was there she worked with a music teacher who began to teach her the fundamentals of songwriting.
“I never wanted to be a pop star, I didn’t even want to be a singer initially. I actually wanted to be a guitar player, and I would just write any lyrics to go on the tracks and I would sing over the tracks that I would write, and my mom would say I was good. When I was 13, I realized that I liked singing, and kind of grew into that, and my aspirations took off from there,” she said.
While attending Belmont, Mackenzie said she has had the chance to play frequently in and around the school but is looking forward to doing a promotional tour and playing some shows when One Look comes out later in the year.
In the interim, she will continue her studies and continue to glean the acclaim and accolades for the singles as they are released.
For more information, visit https://www.cassidymackenzie.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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