I’m looking at Ellie Austin, junior songwriting major, through the viewfinder of my camera. She sits in front of a baby grand piano in the corner of one of the Union practice rooms.
“Just play something?” she asked.
“Sure!” I responded. She starts to play, first slowly, then with confidence, like she’s figured out her direction. The camera shutter clicks as I start to snap pictures, but then after a few notes, she starts to sing. For a moment, my camera clicking stops.
This is fortunate — being able to do this interview in person, that is — in that I thought this interview would more than likely be taking place over Zoom — functional, but much less fun.
You see, Ellie has been studying remotely this semester from her hometown of Murfreesboro. The fact that this interview could happen on a day she planned to be in Jackson was the stars aligning.
“So tell me about songwriting,” I said.
“So I basically have been writing songs since like second grade,” Ellie said. “I’ve always used that as my way to process everything I’m feeling and experiencing; kind of as my therapy before I ever really knew what therapy was.”
Ellie Austin said this as she sat across from me at the Green Frog coffee shop thirty minutes before we took photos at the practice rooms.
“I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t write,” she said. She told me how she loved songwriting even as a child — how she used to perform her songs to an audience that consisted only of her parents. Even at a young age, she was already using songwriting to put perspective to the world around her.
“They’re like ‘we didn’t ever figure out how to say this till we were thirty. How,” she laughed, “how can you say this at twelve years old?’”
“When you used to do those performances for your parents, was it like the thing where you would set up the chairs in the living room?” I asked.
She tells me how she used to sit on a stool at the end of her bed and play the songs she had written, and that her parents would hear the music and come stand and listen. She tells me how they sometimes would express concern when her songs would get too emotional.
“I’d have to preface it with being like ‘ok, you know I have to be more dramatic in my songs to make it a good song,” she started laughing again, “I’m ok.’”
Songwriting was the lens Ellie used to process her world.
“So is that what you want to do with life then? Songwriting?” I asked.
“I knew that I always wanted to be a songwriter, but I guess,” she paused, “I didn’t realize how much of my life I really am willing to devote to that until probably senior year of high school.” Her senior year of high school she had to pick a topic for her senior thesis project.
“I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I knew it had to be about songwriting somehow,” she said. “So, in my research, I figured out songwriting therapy was a real thing and so, the more I researched that, and all the clinical methods people use to practice songwriting therapy, I realized ‘wow, this is what I’ve been doing my entire life.’”
It was around this same time that Ellie was dealing with some life struggles of her own, and it makes sense that the therapy she would turn to was songwriting. The songs written in the wake of those struggles would become Ellie’s first EP, titled “Dear Body.”
“It just felt too real,” she said, as she told me how she had never written about things like that before.
“I was researching for my thesis, and I was writing this paper, and I was kinda feeling like a hypocrite. Like, why can I not write about the hardest things I’m going through, right now?”
So she did — she wrote about them, and by the end of her senior year, she had a five-song EP to go along with her thesis.
“I just really felt God telling me to get it all out there,” she said. “I just knew how hopeless I had felt, and so I just never wanted anyone else to feel that way, and I guess, to be the voice I wish I had had.”
Ellie started looking for a college after high school and in looking, she fell in love with Union. But even though it was the college of her choice, it did not come without struggles. Ellie will be one of Union’s first students to graduate with a major in commercial music songwriting, which comes with growing pains — but growing pains she took in stride.
“It kinda did drive me to be better and the best that I can be,” she said. Now in her junior year, she has a songwriting professor whom she loves and gets to meet with every week over Zoom. “I feel like I’ve grown so much, even just in the past semester with him.”
This past February, Ellie won first place in the first round of the Tennessee Songwriter competition hosted at Jackson’s Carnegie Legends Museum. She now goes on to the next round of the competition hosted in Memphis.
“The same song I won the competition with here, it’s called ‘Over,’ I posted it on Instagram for this contest that The Bluebird is putting on,” she said. “It’s called The Golden Pick contest.”
“Over” won the March contest of The Golden Pick as well, which means Ellie will be headed on to a final round of the competition at the end of the year. Because she won the competition, she also gets to perform two songs at The Bluebird.
“So many major artists have gotten their start there, it’s super exciting,” Ellie said, through a smile that seemed to say that this is only the beginning.
Ellie told me that while she does not know exactly where she’s headed in life, she knows it will involve songwriting. She writes at least one song a week, something she has been doing for years.
“I’ve got a big catalog, I just have to decide what I want to do with it, I guess.”
She is still playing the notes, she is just waiting to find the direction.
“Do you see yourself writing for big artists one day; would that be the dream?” I asked.
“Ideally, I would love to do that,” she said. “I’ve been told by people they could hear Kelsea Ballerini or Kasey Musgraves, or Little Big Town, kinda like bigger country artists singing my songs, and so in my head, that means that I would have made it.”