Meet Skylar Regan

We recently connected with Skylar Regan and have shared our conversation below.

Skylar, so great to have you on the platform and excited to have you share your wisdom with our community today. Communication skills often play a powerful role in our ability to be effective and so we’d love to hear about how you developed your communication skills.

As a songwriter, I take a complex emotional situation and break it down into its most fundamental pieces, capturing a huge amount of emotion in just a minutes-long story. To be a good songwriter, you therefore have to be a good storyteller.

I come from a long line of Italians from northern New Jersey, and there is nothing we love more than talking and telling stories. I’m well trained in the art of hashing out the good ol’ days on the porch with my family, drink in hand. I always want my songwriting to be grounded in that feeling – telling stories about my loved ones to my loved ones.

But I think I gained an almost reverence for storytelling from watching my dad tell stories in a higher-stakes setting, through eulogies at family funerals over the years. While there is a deep sadness in the fact that I’ve seen my dad give a number of eulogies, I’ve learned so much about the importance of storytelling from these moments. My dad approaches the task with a great sense of honor – it’s an honor to write about the people you care about and to do so in a way that captures their essence. If you think it’s hard to write a song about a single emotion or situation, imagine how difficult it is to capture the entire life of a person in a short speech. When you get that right – when you tell a story with precision and rawness, and tell it with emotion that brings you back to the feeling of telling stories on the porch – you transform prose into poetry that brings people together.

I try to carry this honor with me when I write a song, whether that song is about something serious and even when it is about something light-hearted. I’m always trying to craft the perfect story. What story am I telling, and to whom? What love am I describing – love lost or love found? How can I make this song as honest and as personal as possible, while also tapping into something universal? How will I approach performing the song so that it’s received in its most genuine form? I try to become a better storyteller with every song I write.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I’m a NYC-based pop rock artist, but I like to say that my real genre is “loud women.” As a female singer-songwriter, I’m constantly paying homage to those who carved out space across genres for women to sing their truth loudly and without restraint. I’m deeply inspired by women like Janis Joplin, Tina Turner, Stevie Nicks, Lady Gaga, Florence Welch, and Miley Cyrus.

Much like these women, I make music that is unapologetic and that is meant to be played at full volume in your car with the windows down. I’m so excited to say that my first single “Talk About It” comes out on May 2nd! It’s the anthem you blast when you’re finally ready to let go of the person you were always too good for. It fuses NYC grunge with sleek pop-rock polish — think No Doubt meets Olivia Rodrigo, or 4 Non Blondes meets Kelly Clarkson.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Being a hard-working, curious, and teachable student in school has helped me grow as an artist today. From a young age, I always set goals for myself to work towards. These used to be simple things like getting good grades and running a personal best at a track meet. No matter how small the goal was, I would become a bit obsessed with achieving it. I’ve kept this drive throughout my life, and it has definitely helped me bring my music career to life. Once I have a goal in mind, whether it’s learning a new instrument or recording an EP, I will put in whatever work I need to make it happen.

I was also the kid that asked a million questions. Now as a musician, if I hear a song I like, I am curious to find out why I like it. Is it the chord progression? An interesting synth? A key change? The more I focus on these details, the more I notice patterns I can use in my own work.

Lastly, I was always able to take instruction and learn from the experts around me. I’ve been lucky enough to have had great teachers throughout my life, and I’ve tried to absorb as much as I can from them.

I still consider myself a beginner, and for fellow artists early in their journey, my biggest piece of advice is to act like a student. I believe that if you love what you do, you will be a student of your art form for the rest of your life. When I was just starting out, it felt like there was an endless amount of things to learn, and that was extremely overwhelming! I constantly felt behind because everything I learned just opened up doors to new things that I didn’t even know existed before. I’ve slowly started to understand that there will always be more to learn, no matter how far along you are on your journey. That’s really the beauty of pursuing art. Learning your art form and honing your craft is a life-long endeavor, so work towards being the best student you can be.

What has been your biggest area of growth or improvement in the past 12 months?

Over the past year, I’ve let myself become a more creative person. Before this year, I never called myself an artist. I rarely sang in public, and I had never written a full song. On May 2nd, I’m releasing my first single! A lot can change in 12 months when you give yourself a chance.

For a long time, I thought that creativity was an innate skill, a gift that people had or didn’t have. What I’ve realized is that it’s actually a muscle that you can train over time. You have to write a lot of bad songs to write a good song. I think my greatest area of improvement has been accepting this fact and continuing to write as much as possible. Each bad song pushes me to be more creative on the next, and those few good songs make me eager to write more.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://linktr.ee/skylar_regan
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skylar_regan/
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@skylar_regan

Image Credits

Hernandez Empire