by Vivian Grunauer, Switzerland
“You don’t need a song, you need a feeling.” This quote is one of the most important aspects if you want to write a song. You can’t just sit down on a sunny afternoon and tell yourself that you are going to write a song now. A song itself is like art. It is complex, beautiful and only the person who wrote it can understand it completely. But if a song is really beautiful, you feel like you are the person who wrote it because you have the same emotions as the writer when you listen to the song. A really good song carries you away, makes you smile or even cry. So if you want to write a song, you need to have a strong emotion or feeling you can write about. 
Did you know that more than 70% of all the songs in the world are about love? If you ask yourself why, the answer is pretty simple. As I mentioned before, to write a song you need a feeling, and love is the strongest emotion of all emotions. Everyone knows how it feels to have a broken heart or to not be able to stop thinking about this one special person. Many people are annoyed because there are so many love songs and many of them are about almost the same thing. I don’t think there is any reason to be upset because, if you are really sad and you write a song about that, it can be really releasing and helpful to get over a hard time in your life. Or maybe you feel exactly the opposite. Maybe you are so happy that you want to scream your happiness out into the wide world.
I have never been the kind of girl who writes in a diary. I tried to do that a couple of times but I was always too lazy to write daily. My kind of diary was my songbook. Whenever I felt like something was bothering me I wrote it into that book. Sometimes I just wrote a few words, and other times a whole text. I didn’t turn all of those thoughts into songs but all the songs I wrote had their first appearance in this little book. That’s the reason why my songs are really personal. They are my kind of diary.
Last year, I sang at our city festival with my band “Vie and We.” I had sung at this festival before, but this time it felt completely different to be on stage. On the one hand that was because it was the first appearance of my band on stage, and on the other hand it was the first time that I sang my own songs in public. I was really nervous because I knew that all the people that were listening to me that day would know some of my most personal feelings and thoughts after that performance. But it was totally worth it. To see that the audience liked my songs, that they liked my self-made little artwork, made me very happy. I hope that I’ll have another opportunity like this in the near future.
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