When The Angels Come Out

I spent most of this week in my head, circling the same hallway, opening the same doors, finding the same empty rooms. I kept asking myself what I’m going to write about for this week’s episode, and then immediately not liking any answer I gave myself. I realized I haven’t felt good about much this week.

Then I looked outside. Gray. Heavy. The kind of sky that sits right on your shoulders. Oh, right. The angels are out.

When I was little, I was fully convinced clouds were angels. They only showed up when I felt sad; therefore, the clouds were there for me. Simple math for a spiritually dramatic kid who grew up going to church and took it all to heart. I’d have a string of cloudy days where I felt… off. Not crying, just muted. And then I’d wake up to a blue sky scrubbed clean, and I’d smile to myself, genuinely thinking, I don’t need the Angels today. I later learned they simply call this seasonal depression. I still like my version better. Where the clouds are Angels that only appear when I’m sad.

I did make myself go out this week. Last night, I went to the improv club downtown D.C. and saw Marcello Hernandez from SNL. He was great, sharp, charming, totally get why he’s on that stage. But the comic right before him? Unreal. I want to see that man everywhere. The whole room felt like a secret we were all good at keeping. Part of that is the rule: they lock your phone in a little felt pouch with a magnetic seal, and you keep it on you the whole show. It’s like a clothing security tag but for your screen; you tap it on a magnet on the way out, and it pops open. I loved that. I love rules that keep things alive. Some rooms need to be just a room. Every demographic got roasted. Equal-opportunity obliteration. It was hilarious, and it worked because no one was busy collecting evidence for the internet. We agreed to be there, together, without escape hatches. I want more of that, more spaces where the point is to be present, not to post.

On the writing front, I’ve been busy in the kind of way that makes time disappear. I officially have ten songs copyrighted, group registration for unpublished works is absolutely the move for a self-proclaimed starving artist. (I’m literally starving only because I forgot to make dinner; there’s lasagna in the microwave as I type this, please don’t judge me.) I grouped ten pieces into one application, hit submit, and exhaled. Since then, I’ve written four more songs and built demos I’m genuinely excited about. They’re stuck in my head, which is usually a good sign and also a gentle form of self-torture.

If you know me in person, you already know this: poetry has always been my engine. It’s how I think, how I move, how I make sense of anything. People tell me I even act poetic, quirky but elegant, somehow, like the sentences in my head are already broken into stanzas. I’m not a singer. I’m not a musician. I’m a writer. But songs are just poems that learned how to breathe on a beat, so we’re getting along just fine. I’m learning the tools, and once I have the bones, I can pop these out fast. They carry, they’ll sell. I know this because I’ve become so obsessed with this entire project that I’ve even begun to reverse-engineer several different artists’ brand era by era, benchmarked it against the arcs of their most successful peers to forecast the next album, and tailored my heartbreak song to fit that future silhouette exactly.

Hint: I have an obsessive, addictive personality.

The pivot from page to studio started in Nashville a month ago. I did a tiny social experiment: I took a poetry book to a bar and waited. A musician asked if I write, and within minutes, he was trying to turn one of my stanzas into a melody. I texted a friend, “Okay, this just happened. What do I do?” Then I spent the entire next day learning how to translate the thing I already do into songwriting structure. Verse. Pre. Hook. Bridge. The morning after, I sat down, obsessively, like a raccoon with a locked trash can, and two songs fell out of me. I sent them to my friend, and he was blown away. I’ve been getting faster and sharper ever since, just stacking skills and trusting my ear. (:

If you work in the industry and want to hear demos, please let me know! I’m just a girl who is turning her poems into killer songs. I want singers to cut these, make them their own. I want to be in the rooms where decisions get made, and songs get placed. I’m actively building those connections. Introduce me to the person who will fall in love with what I write, and I’ll show up prepared.

Back to the angels. It’s been cloudy and rainy the past few days, muggy in that way that makes your hair and brain both misbehave. I think that’s been the whole story behind the story. I spent two days scolding myself for not feeling inspired when the truth was simpler: the sky’s been low, which makes me a little low too. That’s not failure. It’s the weather. So I’m letting this week be simple. No grand thesis, no stunt. Just a small life update, a room where phones stayed quiet, a shirt that says what I’m too tired to explain, and some songs that make me feel like I’m finally translating myself.

If you needed the angels too this week, I see you. If you’ve got blue above you today, take an extra second with it, for both of us. Either way, we’re fine. We’ve got weather, and we’ve got words, and we’ll keep showing up until the sky remembers how to be bright again.

xo,
Sheridan Guerrette
WhatSheridanSaid.com
Life Behind the Artist: Wed at 9/8C