Peters Township teen chosen as International Songwriting Competition semifinalist
Amelia Severns is ready for some serious recording.
Amelia Severns records her vocals at Mr. Smalls Recording and Mastering Studio.
"Nightmares" is scheduled for streaming release on March 14.
As has been the case with mostly everyone during the past year, Amelia Severns found that she had a bit more time on her hands.
“I’ve always been pretty focused on school, so I haven’t had as much time to get into my music,” the Peters Township High School freshman said.
Her music is something she has pursued in one manner or another most of her life, and with the COVID-19 pandemic tending to keep her at home, she decided to take it up a notch as far as her creativity is concerned.
One of the results is her selection is a semifinalist in the Nashville, Tenn.-based International Songwriting Competition for 2020, wowing the judges in the Performance category for her audio rendition of her original “Give Me Your Melodies.”
“They also take into account the quality of your voice,” said Amelia’s mother, Dr. Natalie Severns, about the category’s criteria. “And that’s against adults, so we were happy that she got it.”
“Give Me your Melodies” is scheduled to be available April 16 on streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Music, and it will be preceded by another of Amelia’s originals, “Nightmare,” March 19.
The songs represent a culmination thus far of her longstanding interest in music, spurred to a large degree by her mother’s formal training as an opera singer.
“When I was really little,” Amelia recalled, “I used to mimic her,” making up her own words as she went.
Natalie remembers, too.
“We would say she was singing in Amelia language,” she said.
Eventually, it became English.
“When I was around 6, I started to write my own music. I wasn’t playing piano then, but my uncle did, so I wrote a song for the talent show and had my uncle play it for me,” Amelia said, referencing fellow music enthusiast James Pecora. “I think that was the first time I performed live. I sang my original song.”
These days, she develops melodies on the piano to go along with lyrics, capturing the sounds prolifically on her smartphone along the way.
“I have thousands of recordings on my voice memos,” Amelia acknowledged, giggling at the thought of the quantity. “I also found my songwriting notebook from when I was really little, and the songs are so cute,” she said, laughing some more.
She gets serious, though, when working on finished products, using a digital audio station with Ableton music creation software to come up with technologically advanced listening material.
In the summer, she took of the tracks she’d created to wrap them up at Mr. Smalls Recording and Mastering Studio in the North Side, “Give Me your Melodies” included.
“Once I finished the song, I wanted to know how to get it out there, so I searched ‘songwriting competitions,'” she said, leading to her finding and entering the Nashville contest.
Naturally, her selection as one of 72 Performance semifinalists among 26,000 total entries makes her mother proud.
“I’ve always enjoyed music and dancing, and so it’s very exciting to see blossom into the singer that she really is. Being a singer, I’m probably a little more critical than most people,” Natalie said about her evaluation of others’ talents. “And I think she’s excellent.”
As for her own background, Natalie grew up in Mt. Lebanon and, when she wasn’t performing, spent her summers working for her dentist grandmother. That experience contributed to her making a crucial choice down the road.
“I actually had a scholarship to sing in Italy, and I had to make the decision to become a singer or an orthodontist,” Natalie recalled.
Today, she and her husband – Dr. Chris Severns, who provides family and cosmetic dentistry – share a practice on Route 19 in Peters Township.
Perhaps her daughter is on a similar path.
“She’s in the gifted program and does very, very well at school,” Natalie said. “She’ll have to make those hard decisions, as well.”
For now, Amelia plans to compose a song a month. And if her success in the International Songwriting Competition is any indicator, her listeners are going to like them a lot.
The Spotify pre-save link to Amelia Severns’ “Nightmare” is distrokid.com/hyperfollow/ameliaseverns/nightmare. To catch Amelia’s cover version of Olivia Rodrigo’s “All I Want,” visit youtu.be/mcFE5yHBh10.