Meet Caitlin

Well, I’m gonna be honest with you.

I thought about telling you about myself in a way that was all professional-sounding, and saying things like, “From a young age, Caitlin was already expressing a love for music...” blah, blah, blah. I also thought about telling you about the cookie-cutter version of the 18 year old singer/songwriter who just wanted to reach people with her music. You know, trying to make myself seem really awesome or something. But, I felt pretty strange writing about myself in the 3rd person.

I’m really just a normal Wisconsin teenager - who happens to have extremely big dreams. I’m 18, and frankly, I’d like to sound 18. Plain and simple. No need to fluff it up, right? So, I decided to tell you my story - or at least the start of it, in my own words.

I have loved music from an early age, but I was no Mozart. My love for music consisted of walking around singing the ABC’s for anyone who would listen, dancing in the living room lip-syncing to my favorite Britney Spears song, or playing the air-guitar and singing along to The Beach Boys with my Dad. Nobody expected back then that I’d ever have an album out by the time I was 17. Not even me. I did take piano lessons starting at age 5, but I quit at age 11 because I hated it, and never practiced. Figures. Now I play everyday and absolutely love it. Oh, and my best friend and I did plan to be in a pop-music singing girl group, just like the rest of the 7-year-old girl population in the 90’s, but as you can probably guess, that plan fell through.

I guess when I entered middle school, I decided to put my lip-syncing, wannabe pop-star, and air-guitar playing days behind me. I wanted to start doing the real thing. I joined my school choir, which eventually led me to my first love. Singing. I wanted to sing as much as I could - in talent shows, national anthem for sporting events, and I joined 3 different choirs.

Then, when I entered my freshman year of high school, my mom got a desktop Mac computer for her work. She was showing me all the cool features on it, one of them being GarageBand - a music recording program that comes on all Mac’s. I remember being so amazed that you could actually record songs right from your own computer. As you can imagine, I wanted to record songs of my own, which led me to my second love. Songwriting. As well as obviously sparking a lot of interest in recording, editing, and mixing music. So much that 3 years later as a senior in high school, I released my debut album - of which I wrote, recorded, edited, mixed, arranged, and produced every song from my own bedroom. I don’t have an agent or manager - I’m doing this all on my own. I even created this website myself.

I won’t lie. It gets to be extremely difficult and really frustrating, but the thing is - I don’t care. I’m so excited that I don’t have to wait for someone else to decide that I’m worth their time in order to start living my dreams. I get to show them myself. When it comes down to it, all the hard work is definitely worth it.

As for now, I’m just an 18 year old dreamer with a voice and a piano currently taking on my freshman year at Berklee College of Music.

So that’s the beginning of my story. I don’t know the rest, or how it ends yet. I guess I’ll let you know after I live it.