Olivia Barton
For Olivia Barton, songwriting looks like stopping whatever she’s busy with on a Tuesday afternoon and sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor, surrounded by piles of dirty laundry and dishes from breakfast that morning. Songs are a spontaneous art for the Nashville folk-pop songsmith, trailing behind a buildup of emotions that can only be released through pausing in the thick of the chaos and taking the time to write.
“Initially, it feels really involuntary when a song wants to be written, so I usually just plop down on the floor and try to let it come out, in the midst of whatever is going on that day,” Barton says while sitting in a coffee shop in East Nashville. She has opened tour dates for established names like Lizzy McAlpine and Madi Diaz, but she’s headlining a tour of her own that covers mostly the East Coast and returns to Nashville on Friday.
Imperfection is Barton’s superpower. Her raw, real, spur-of-the-moment songwriting connects on a basic human level, putting a spotlight on the unavoidable emotions that emerge right before rushing out the door for a shift at a restaurant, or while sitting on the couch thinking about all of the dishes in the sink that need to be done. It’s Barton in the middle of a normal day, trying to express something she didn’t even realize she needed to feel.
“I was just hooked,” she says of her entry into songwriting. “I did it in secret, and I was so scared to share my songs, but it just always felt like the only thing I was really going to do. It never really felt like a choice for me.”
After graduating high school, she attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, where her horizons as a songwriter grew exponentially. Barton felt a shift in her writing: For the first time in her life, she was surrounded by music, and completely inspired by the music of her peers.
“I was forming, like, my own … musical language, and I was figuring out the kinds of things I wanted to say in my songs,” Barton says. “I enjoyed singing with other people, and I loved going to shows, and I recorded my first songs with producers. But when I wrote, I preferred to do that songwriting exploration on my own. And I feel really grateful for that time to just have my little cocoon and find out what kind of music I wanted to make.”
Barton’s most recent release “Dad Song,” a gentle single with an acoustic pop groove, is the first taste of an album she plans to release in 2025. She writes with candor as she explains some challenges in her relationship with her dad, and how she wants it to be stronger: “I finally called you after Kelly’s dad got diagnosed / Through my tears I told you that I wanna be close / I could barely choke it out, asking if you want that too / You said, ‘Honey I’d get on a plane right now if you asked me to.’”
When it comes to lyricism, it feels like you’re listening to Barton’s diary. She turns mundane moments into something extraordinary. Her detailed descriptions of the events in her life make it feel like listeners have experienced the same things she has, even though their lives are not exactly the same.
“I just happen to love songs that give you a window into a specific moment in time,” Barton says. “There’s so much meaning in everything. I think what songwriting does for me is it really grounds me in my own life. I don’t have to go through something extraordinary for it to be valuable. I can start to notice the little things, as cliché as that sounds. We give those little things value by writing songs about them.”
