Meaghan Smith sings the story of your life

If empathy was a superpower Meaghan Smith would have a cape. Forget about leaping tall buildings; she has a way of digging into people’s hearts and lifting them out of dark and lonely places or adding an extra ray of sunshine onto life’s most beautiful moments. She helps find people who are lost and celebrates those who already found their path. 

However, some six years ago, the Juno- and ECMA-award-winning singer and song writer from Nova Scotia was starting to lose her own way. She had been on a 20-year journey that seemed to have a great trajectory. She was doing exactly what she loved; making music and art with her husband and producer Jason, touring and sharing her music with her fan base around the world, and ready to stamp her passport for an adventure into parenthood. Life was not just good for Meaghan Smith. It was pretty great.

For most of Meaghan’s career her music was inspired by her own life and experiences, mostly happy with a little bit of heartache in the weave. But the ground shifted under her when she was expecting her first child, and life as she and Jason had always known it started to unravel. Her body was put to the test bringing both of her boys into the world. The atypical physical stress she endured would impact her hard-earned career. She was overjoyed to be a mum but her career as a touring musician came to an abrupt end. Knowing that with her new reality the ways she used to work was no longer sustainable; wanting to be there for her family; restoring her health; feeling the changes to the industry and her awareness of the environmental impact of being a travelling musician all came to a head. Her record contract was cancelled.

“I could feel myself getting depressed,” Meaghan says, a feeling that was foreign to her. “I could feel myself slipping into a dark place. One night I was up late rocking one of my boys [and] had an epiphany. I thought, I don’t want to write songs about my own life right now. I want to write about someone else’s life. I want to go on a vacation in someone else’s life. That is where the idea for ‘Our Song’ came from.”

 

Everyone has a story 

Meaghan has reinvented herself in her new custom song-writing business she calls “Our Song.”  

“Looking back, I survived this time because of the support of my husband, my family and my fanbase who immediately reached out and said ‘yes, I would love for you to write a song for me.’”

Becoming a parent exploded her heart and Meaghan believes that empathy is at the core of her song writing. “Being able to say I know a little bit about the way that you feel and that I can write you a song that tells your story is really something special.” 

The growing catalogue of Our Songs is as varied as the people who reach out with their ideas. “Everyone has a story waiting to be written,” Meaghan says from her home in Timberlea, NS where she does most of her writing. “If I can write albums about my life, anyone can have an album—or at the very least a song—about them or someone they love.”  

It can take three to four months to write a custom song. Meaghan’s process involves questions to help reveal characteristics, traits and experiences unique to the song request. While most of her songs are attached to very personal stories she has written, she has a special place in her heart for songs she wrote for two schools in Nova Scotia: “Everyone Belongs”, commissioned by Basinview School in Bedford, and “Life is a Journey” for the Halifax Grammar School. Both songs capture the youthful voices of students. Meaghan admits school was a struggle for her with multiple learning differences that went unidentified at the time. Even now she says that she doesn’t read music, she feels it.

Feeling all the feels means there is an emotional connection pulling her into every song. Sometimes lyrics and melodies surface quickly but other times it can months of exploration and soul searching before the true story reveals itself. “Most of my commissions have a deadline for a specific milestone,” Meaghan says, “so I am driven by deadline—but there have been times that I have really struggled.”

Several years ago, Meaghan received an inquiry from a father in the United States. His daughter was a fan and attended one of her shows when she was touring. He wanted a song for his daughter who had had been abducted, abused and escaped. The traumatic story was so overwhelming that initially, Smith thought it was a cruel joke, but she investigated and discovered it to be very real. 

“Going into this story and trying to get inside the head of this young girl was a very difficult thing to do. I didn’t know if I could do it, but the father asked me not to give up. I ended up going into all of the different stories of each family member and wrote a song called “You Live.”

It took eight months to write the song, peeling away the layers on what she thought the young women needed to hear and how she needed to hear it. Meaghan and Jason eventually brought in an additional producer making sure that they got everything right. She knows the song did not change this young woman’s life, but it helped. Her father says that his daughter listened to the song on her way to every therapy session and the therapist asked permission to share it with other patients.

“It’s really thrilling as a song writer to have that amount of impact and to know that doing what we are doing can really help people.”

 
Meaghan and husband/producer Jason in the Sonic Temple Recording Studio in Halifax.

“The song was perfect”

David Loomer of Sackville, Nova Scotia said that he was never one to wear his heart on his sleeve. But deep in his grief after the loss of his soul mate and wife Bonnie of 50 years to ALS, (Lou Gehrig disease) Loomer reached out to Meaghan Smith to share his story. He had stumbled across her song, “Good Good Heart” when he was searching for music to help heal the space
that was left behind after Bonnie’s passing.

“I thought it was a silly endeavor at first,” says Loomer, who worked many years in the funeral and ambulance business and was no stranger to loss. “I dealt with death many times in my life but when it’s happening to you it’s different. In the last few years of Bonnie’s life, we were inseparable.”

Meaghan says the song for Bonnie was as much of a challenge in a different way as the song for the family in the US, and her face lights up in the telling of her journey writing the song, “Whole”.

“It took me a long time to write this,” she says. “I kept trying to write a song for him that was uplifting. I tried so many different approaches and different point of views. I must have written that song four or five times but none of them felt right. This poor guy had been waiting eight or nine months. At one point I said to the universe, ‘what am I missing why am I having such a hard time writing this song?’ and it was like I heard a voice. Something, someone spoke to me and said the song is not for me, the song is for Dave. As soon as that happened, I sat down and wrote the song in 30 minutes.”

Dave Loomer is certain that the something or someone that spoke to Meaghan Smith that evening was his Bonnie. “My wife was always doing for other people and she was making sure that this song was for me,” says Loomer. “The song was perfect.”

The relationship of client and song writer quickly shifts into something more meaningful for Meaghan.  Getting that close to very personal stories creates a bond and she cherishes each one. 

“I refer to Meaghan as my third daughter,” says Loomer. “I worry about her sometimes because I know how deeply she gets involved. She is living the story herself.”

 

Sharing the immersion

Acclaimed folk musician Dave Gunning doesn’t think that the full immersion into her clients’ lives affects Meaghan in an unhealthy way. He has collaborated with Smith on several Our Songs when she needs to throw the song writing under a different lens. 

“Meaghan certainly has empathy for people,” says Gunning during an on-line interview from his studio, the Wee House of Music, in Pictou County. The two have been friends for years and Meaghan, also a talented visual artist, illustrated Dave’s children’s book, These Hands, published in 2015, following the success of the song by the same name that he wrote with another well-known Canadian artist, George Canyon.

“She is brilliant. You just know that when you work with her you are going to get something really great. She doesn’t settle for anything less. She doesn’t put out any stinkers, that’s for sure,” chuckles Gunning.

Dave Loomer says even two years later that he listens to
his song every day. “This song has been a huge part of my healing process.

 

“Living my purpose”

In Halifax, Maureen Reid says that she plays her song, commissioned for her 60th birthday in 2020, when she needs a reminder that she is enough.  Her Our Song, “Tangerine”, gives Maureen the feeling that at 60 years old, she has arrived, and she is comfortable in her own skin. “My song reminds me that I am living my purpose.”

Reid’s first connection to Meaghan Smith was as a business mentor when the Our Song concept was just starting to get its moment of lift.  She invited a group of inspiring women to her home to meet the song writer and brainstorm ideas to help build the Our Song brand. Meaghan had a loyal following as a performer but the custom song writing business needed a new business plan. “What she heard from the women meeting with her that day was that her business wasn’t really scalable. She had to do the writing, but she just needed to build awareness.” Meaghan left that meeting with several writing gigs, including the one for Halifax Grammar School where Maureen Reid’s daughter had been a student.

With her 60th birthday approaching, Reid decided that the best gift anyone could give her was an Our Song of her own; one that her daughter Lily could be part of.

Her husband Doug and Lily made the presentation last Thanksgiving. They had a quiet COVID-19 celebration of gratitude with just the three of them. Our Songs are package with as much thought and care as the development of the music. Carefully opening the box layered with orange tissue paper and a small abstract painting of different shades of her signature colour that inspired the name of the song, “Tangerine”, Maureen read a message from Meaghan Smith that shared her approach to the song. Another letter captured comments of the family and friends who influenced the lyrics. Finally Maureen played her song, plugging the enclosed jump drive into her computer.

“I had tears, Doug had tears and Lily was struck by the emotion,” says Reid, thinking back to the moment. “I had only made mention of the idea to my husband once, and he ran with it. I had no idea of what was happening. We listened and I played it a second time to try to let all sink in. The delivery of the song was delayed because Lily was playing part of the instrumental and she could not get into the studio because of COVID-19 restrictions. It was so beautiful to hear Lily’s music in the song.”

 

A song is an experience

Meaghan Smith has written more than 100 custom songs in the six years since launching her business. She had no idea that her pre-pandemic pivot was an innovation that would see her and her husband Jason secure a livelihood for their family that would sustain them during a time when artists would have their worlds turned upside down. She loves that she can collaborate with other musicians and pay them for their work. She prides herself on being independent of government funding and has the knowledge to help other artists to set up their own custom song writing business. 

“I think all musicians should be doing this and I can help them,” Meaghan says. “We are in an era where people don’t want things anymore, they want experiences, and a song is an experience.”

She has written songs for people in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, the US and right across Canada. With a rapidly expanding catalogue of custom material, you might think that her work would become formulaic.

“It’s anything but,” says Dave Gunning. “That’s because she is a world-class song writer. She never steals from herself.”

Helping to lift people out of dark places or making a joyous occasion even more memorable is what Meaghan Smith might have been born to do. She realized that that her own soul needed healing and she finds it by getting inside the lives of the people who have their own will to survive and thrive.

If someone was to write an Our Song for her?

“Oh, that is such a good question,” she says, pausing for a few moments. “I think it would have to be about how grateful I am. Grateful for my family, grateful to be alive and grateful for music.”