I Wrote One Song for One Person and It Became the Most Honest Thing I've Ever Made

My mom doesn't know music theory. She can't tell you the difference between a major seventh and a suspended chord. She doesn't follow music blogs or listen to podcasts about songwriting craft. She listens to the oldies station in her car and occasionally something on the radio will make her tear up and she won't always know why.

She is, in other words, a completely average listener. And she is the person for whom I wrote the most important song of my creative life.

I didn't set out to write her something. It started with a phone call.

The Phone Call That Started Everything

It was a Tuesday afternoon, nothing special about it. She called to check in, the way she does, and somewhere in the middle of the conversation she started talking about my grandfather — her dad — who passed away when I was pretty young. She mentioned a specific memory: the two of them sitting on the back porch of his house in the summer, shelling peas into a bowl, not really talking, just being together.

She said, "I don't know why I think about that so much. It wasn't even a big moment."

I got off the phone and went straight to my guitar. I didn't have a plan. I just had that image — a porch, a summer afternoon, a father and daughter, a bowl of peas, the particular weight of ordinary moments that turn out to be the ones you carry forever.

I wrote the whole thing in about two hours. Which almost never happens for me.

Why Writing for One Person Feels Different

When I write for a general audience — or what I imagine a general audience to be — there's this constant negotiating happening in my head. Will this resonate? Is this too specific? Too niche? Too regional? Will someone in Seattle get what I'm saying, or does this only make sense to someone who grew up in the same part of the country I did?

All of that negotiating is, I've come to realize, a kind of noise. It's the sound of self-censorship dressed up as consideration for the listener.

When I wrote for my mom, all of that went quiet. I wasn't thinking about whether the imagery was universally relatable. I wasn't worried about the song fitting a genre or a playlist. I was thinking about her — about what she'd said on the phone, about what that memory clearly meant to her, about whether the words I was choosing would actually reach her the way I wanted them to.

The specificity that I usually try to sand down? I leaned into it completely. The porch had a specific color. The bowl of peas was an old ceramic one. The light was the particular gold of late afternoon in August. I wrote every detail I could imagine because I wasn't writing for a demographic. I was writing for a person.

The Paradox of Specific Truth

Here's what surprised me when I eventually shared the song more broadly: the specificity didn't alienate people. It did the opposite.

I posted a rough version online without much explanation, and the responses I got were from people talking about their parents, their grandparents, their own versions of that porch. People from Texas and Ohio and Oregon who had never shelled a pea in their lives told me the song made them cry. A guy in his sixties messaged me saying it made him call his daughter.

None of them had access to my family's specific story. But they had access to the emotional truth underneath it, and that truth was so clearly real — because I hadn't softened it for them — that it landed somewhere deep.

This is the paradox that I think most of us get backwards when we're starting out: we think that to connect with more people, we need to be more general. But actually, the more precisely true something is, the more universally it lands. Because people don't connect with the broad strokes. They connect with the specific texture of genuine feeling.

What My Mom Said When She Heard It

I played it for her over the phone first, because I was nervous and playing it over the phone felt slightly less terrifying than in person. She was quiet for a long moment after it ended.

Then she said, "How did you know about the bowl?"

I hadn't known about the bowl. I'd made it up. But it was the right detail, because I'd been paying attention — to her, to what she'd told me, to what mattered in the story she'd shared. That's the thing about writing for someone you know and love: you've been listening to them your whole life. All of that listening becomes material.

She cried a little. I cried a little. It was the most connected I'd ever felt to something I made.

What It Changed for Me as a Creator

After that song, I started asking myself a different question before I write. Instead of "who is this for," I ask "who specifically is this for." Even when the answer is fictional — even when I'm making up a character or a situation — I try to give that audience a face. A specific person with specific memories and specific losses and specific joys.

The music gets better when I do that. Every time.

I think what that song for my mom taught me is that the most powerful thing art can do is make one person feel genuinely seen. If you can do that — if you can write something true enough and specific enough that one real human being hears it and thinks "yes, that's exactly it" — then you've done the thing. Everything else is just reach.

And reach, it turns out, tends to follow truth. Not the other way around.

So if you've been holding back something personal because you're afraid it's too small, too specific, too inside — I'd encourage you to write it anyway. Write it for the one person it's really about. See what happens when you stop trying to speak to everyone and start trying to speak to someone.

You might find out it's the most honest thing you've ever made.