Meet Jen Waters

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jen Waters a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jen , thank you so much for joining us. You are such a positive person and it’s something we really admire and so we wanted to start by asking you where you think your optimism comes from?
I always feel more optimistic when I sing and write music, especially when I just wrote a new song. Since middle school, I loved to write songs. So, if I have a free moment, I find myself writing a new song. Growing up, I would play the piano constantly, and my parents and brother, Andy, would always watch television, but I played the piano very loudly anyhow.

When writing a song, I start with the song title, and then write the lyric, and then walk around singing what I think should be the melody for a few days, and then pick chords. Then, I sing it into my phone and email it to whoever is producing the track. I figure if I can sing it without a big track or production first then it must be a lasting song. I feel happier when I sing. At one point, I had so many song title ideas that I didn’t know what to do with them. So, I wrote them on a piece of paper and hung it on my closet door, and every time I got a new title idea, then I wrote it on the piece of paper on my closet door. Of course, I would also save the song titles in my computer and a separate title notebook, but it helped to look at them every day on the closet door. I didn’t really have a set writing schedule. Mostly, I wrote the song titles from the closet door when I was walking around doing other things and singing to myself. Sometimes, I would get song ideas from conversations with people, or books I would read, or advertisements for things, but sometimes ideas would pop into my head while going through the day.

Most of the song titles from the closet door have been recorded for my Apple Music releases, WHIMSY, WHIMSY FOR ONE, WHIMSY FOR TWO, PURITY, SIMPLICITY, and FATE, and those recordings are a result of working with Judy Stakee, former Sr. VP of Creative at Warner Chappell Music, at the workshops she held at her home from 2010 through 2016 in Studio City, California, but I have more songs in the song vault from where those came.

In February 2021 during COVID lockdown in California, which was a very pessimistic time, I got up one morning and thought, “I will write a song called ‘Sunflowers.’” Then, by February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and sunflowers were everywhere as an international symbol of peace and a world free of nuclear weapons. My FATE collection of 17 original singer/songwriter songs was released on Apple Music on March 15, 2022, with “Sunflowers” as the first track. Also, in November 2020, I wrote the last track on FATE called “Old Man Winter.” Bored because of the never-ending COVID lockdowns, I was standing in the bathroom at the mirror, and I had this thought: “Old Man Winter.” Then, I thought, “Oh, that’s a song!” So, I researched the idea of the personification of winter in Greek mythology and made up a story about a man who has never heard of Christmas and forgot about summer. I walked around singing that song to myself for months. Then, I got the idea from Joni Mitchell’s Christmas song “River” to bookend “Old Man Winter” with “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” a public domain Christmas carol, like she did with “Jingle Bells” in her song. Now Eric Baines, who is currently the bassist for the band Chicago, that produced much of my music, including FATE, keeps saying that I am like Prince and have endless songs!

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
Along with singing and writing songs, I have a podcast called Pen Jen’s Inkwell Podcast that features children’s music spoken word stories that I wrote and performed, which includes the tracks from my Apple Music releases titled WONDERLAND, WINTER WONDERLAND, IMPOSSIBLE THINGS, CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER, ENTIRELY BONKERS, and my latest batch of stories called THE GREAT PUZZLE. You can notice the ALICE IN WONDERLAND themes for titles! For instance, author Lewis Carroll wrote: “Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”

Lately, I have been releasing the newest stories as Pen Jen’s Inkwell Podcast episodes first before the tracks are featured on Apple Music as THE GREAT PUZZLE, including “The Mary Nose Mysteries,” “The Peaceable Kingdom,” “Shiny Nose,” “All Angels,” “Father Time,” “The Potter’s House,” “Mandy Dandie’s Pink Lemonade,” and “The Dilemmas of Daisy Dimple.” The stories range in topic, including my own mystery series similar to NANCY DREW MYSTERIES, the animals from Isaiah 11 as characters similar to WINNIE-THE-POOH, the historical fiction biography of the creation of Rudolph-the-Red-Nosed-Reindeer, a fictionalized story of the life of Joan of Arc and the archangel Michael as a thriller, my version of the personification of time in an abandoned lighthouse in Nantucket, Massachusetts, a modern parable inspired by Jeremiah 18 with the potter and the clay, magic truth-telling pink lemonade, and a girl who plants flowers everywhere, even on her own rebellious brother’s head.

After THE GREAT PUZZLE releases on Apple Music, I was thinking about recording a batch of original Christmas songs, which I have never done. I have ten original ones that I wrote so far. Then, I could record more Pen Jen’s Inkwell Podcast episodes, being that I have endless other stories published on my blog Pen Jen’s Inkwell from which I can chose.

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?
I like to ask a lot of questions and assume that I don’t know enough about a person or situation. So, I ask, “What about this? Or what about that?” It helps to look at situations from many perspectives.

Also, I think I’ve always been good at research. If I have a problem, or a new project, song, or story, I like to take time to research the background of the field or idea and all the options and figure out which one is the best. I don’t just rely on someone else to do the research for me. I like to look into the situation myself.

Learning something new, even if you’re not sure how it is going to benefit you, has helped me. It’s good to try to be knowledgeable about many things, so that you are versatile. It’s best to learn from people who are better than you at something and might be much different than you. Take yourself to new places and experiences instead of just doing the same thing.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?
I’ve always liked the Psalms in the Bible, which are songs. So many of the great musicians were actually psalmists like King David. Over the years, I’ve thought of several musicians like modern-day psalmists, such as Amy Grant, Bono of U2, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash, and Bob Dylan. “Rumors” on my Apple release FATE is a song that I wrote years ago and saved, and it’s more like a lament that U2 would write.

In November 1997, I first met Amy Grant when I was a junior in college at Syracuse University, studying journalism, music, and English. Sports manager Bob Briner, who was president of ProServ Television and helped to manage Michael Jordan in the early days of his career, was a mutual friend, and Bob got me a backstage pass to her concert, and I was so excited. Amy was performing a Christmas concert in Philadelphia, and I drove down to Philadelphia over Thanksgiving break.

When I wrote “Wayward Child” for my 2022 Apple Music release FATE, I tried to write a hymn like Bob Dylan. I’ve never met Bob Dylan, but I think he is an especially fascinating person. I like how many of his song lyrics are now used for children’s picture books like “Man Gave Name to All the Animals,” based on Genesis from SLOW TRAIN COMING.

I especially found Bruce Springsteen’s documentary THE PROMISE: THE MAKING OF THE DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN to be very inspirational. September 13, 2003, I saw Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play FedExField in Maryland, the day after Johnny Cash died, and they all came out dressed in black, honoring Johnny’s song “Man in Black,” and they played Springsteen’s song “The Rising.” Johnny Cash has a fiction book that he wrote on the life of the Apostle Paul called MAN IN WHITE. I liked the book so much that I gave it to Vince Gill with Amy Grant in July 2007 at Wolf Trap in Virginia.

Ironically, the same week in September 2003 that Bruce Springsteen played FedExField and Johnny Cash passed away, I met Bono, the lead singer of U2, at a press event near the White House right before he went to speak to President George W. Bush about funding for the AIDS crisis in Africa. Bono also gave a speech in St. John’s Episcopal Church afterwards. I was so inspired by Bono’s example that I became a Grand Prize Winner in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest by 2005 with my song “Yellow Roses” that I co-wrote with Bob Farrell in Nashville. I remember Chuck Butler, the Nashville musician who made the original demo of the song, saying how much he liked hymns, which are like Psalms.

In May 2004, I attended the speech that Bono gave in Philadelphia near the Liberty Bell. Afterwards, I happened to get in the elevator with Bono and a few other people, hearing him doubt if he gave the right speech, and wonder if he could have done better. In February 2006, when Bono spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., at the Washington Hilton Hotel with the King Abdullah of Jordan in attendance, I was in the overflow room with Chris Lagan, who worked for Bono at the time. In the spirit of the psalmists, in May 2006, I performed my song “Yellow Roses” at an ASCAP Writer’s Showcase hosted by Broadway legend Stephen Schwartz at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Of course, Stephen is known for writing “When You Believe” for Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston for the PRINCE OF EGYPT soundtrack, and I attended many of his ASCAP Foundation Musical Theatre Workshops in Los Angeles.

In 2010, when I started working with Judy Stakee, former Sr. VP of Creative at Warner Chappell Music, at the music workshops at her home, I also met with one of her former songwriters Wayne Kirkpatrick in his Franklin, Tennessee, studio, where he has a castle door that is flown in from Europe. He is responsible for co-writing such songs as “Lead Me On” for Amy Grant, as well as “Change the World” for Eric Clapton. I played Wayne several songs on his piano from the beginnings of the stage musicals that I was working on at the time, including my WHIRLWIND CHRONICLES trilogy: THE MAGIC MUSIC BOX, THE HORSE GATE, and DREAMS OR DUST, as well as KISSES, the life of Milton S. Hershey. At the time, Micheal Flaherty, the co-founder, and former president of Walden Media, had asked me to consider writing a novel series that he could turn into films, and instead, I worked on adapting the middle grade novels into stage musicals.

As Wayne sat in his old armchair, I remember that I also played my songs “Little Bit of Faith” and “The Reckoning” for him on the guitar. Wayne also played me his song “Never Been Unloved” on the guitar that he co-wrote with Michael W. Smith. I specifically asked him to play me that song, and of all the hundreds of songs that he had written, it was the only song in his guitar case, and there was no way that I could have known that when I asked him to play the song for me. And the rest is history!

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Image Credits
Photography by Alan Weissman

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