Her story is just getting starting
Woonsocket teen singer-songwriter releases new EP
IWOONSOCKET deas for songs tend to hit Maddie Skeldon, 17, at the most inconvenient times. She’ll be about to fall asleep, or in the shower, when a word or melody pops into her head. When she can, she’ll sit at the piano and start playing around with it, letting the lyrics and melody develop together through trial and error. Sometimes an online rhyming dictionary helps, too.
“Usually, I don’t know what a song’s about until it’s halfway done,” Skeldon said, but she often pulls inspiration from her life.
Between writing music, being a student at Beacon Charter High School for the Arts and working part-time at a grocery store, Skeldon said she regularly works 60-hour weeks. But some of that hard work is paying off with the Thursday release of her second EP, “Where the Story Ends,” which features four original songs.
“My life is mostly school, music and work,” she said.
Skeldon’s music career started early with piano lessons when she was five years old. She picked up guitar after going to a Keith Urban concert at age nine, and started taking lessons with a professional instructor when she was 14.
She started getting serious about songwriting about two or three years ago, after she was “fooling around” at the piano one day and started composing her own melodies.
“I think quarantine just allowed it to manifest,” Skeldon said.
She said her dad pushed her to record her songs in a professional studio, and described him as “definitely a music lover” and “Beatles-obsessed.” His music collection, plus her mom’s affinity for country music, influenced Skeldon’s own music tastes, though she said she’s starting to branch out and find her own style.
To date, Skeldon has written and recorded about a dozen songs. Her friend Kyle Denson, also a Beacon Charter High School student, is featured on a couple of them, including a duet on Skeldon’s new EP titled “Nightmare.”
Skeldon and Denson have known each other since they were in sixth grade, Skeldon said, and the pair took a road trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland over the summer.
While Denson would occasionally help her with a lyric or give feedback on a draft, Skeldon said with “Nightmare,” the two of them “started completely from scratch together.”
“He was really fun to work with,” Skeldon said. The two friends also star in a music video for the song, which was released on YouTube last week.
The EP also features the song “Unloved,” which Skeldon said is her favorite track.
“It was probably my least favorite going into the studio because it just felt the most unrehearsed,” she said. But after hearing the recording, she said it sounded “raw in a good way.”
Skeldon saved up her grocery store paychecks to attend a summer program at Berklee College of Music, which she said she hopes to attend after graduating high school next year. She said she’d likely major in music business rather than songwriting, but that she’d continue studying guitar.
Skeldon’s EP “Where the Story Ends” is available to stream on Spotify, iTunes, YouTube and Amazon Music.