From Reluctant Songwriter to YouTube Success

From Reluctant Songwriter to YouTube Success

Guest: Shawna Edwards

Shelley: You're listening to the Faithful Career Moves podcast. I'm your host, Shelley Hunter, and this is the place where we talk to people who have found the career they were born to do and recognize God's hand in the process. 

Thank you for joining me on episode 34 of the Faithful Career Moves podcast. As many of you know, my youngest son recently left on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Before leaving, he had the opportunity to speak in church. Well, knowing that a lot of his friends from football and basketball would attend, I really wanted a special musical number, but my son loves the big songs. In fact, the closer he got to submitting his application to serve, the more I noticed his taste in music changed. What had previously been a typical playlist of popular songs turned into songs from the Tabernacle Choir and other more spiritual music, but always the big songs, The Big Crescendo or The Big Orchestra.

When it came time to pick a song for his farewell, I twisted my mom's arm, she is the music leader in our congregation, into putting something together that would speak to him as well as the audience. In doing so, I remembered an experience I had with Michael, his last semester in school. Since it was just down to me and him at home, I often took him to dinner after football or basketball practice, because he was always starving, and this was my secret way of getting to spend a little extra time with him.

Well, one night we met at a restaurant and he drove up as usual with the music blaring, but it wasn't the usual songs. He was playing a song called Restored. As he parked alongside me, he stayed in the car until the song finished. Then when he got out, he said, "Brother Troutman played this song in seminary and it is a banger," which [laughs], if you don't know, it means it's a really good song. 

Well, long story short, that's the song I went looking for, which is how I happened upon Shawna Edwards, or I should say, how I connected her name to several other songs that I already knew and loved.

She's a songwriter and a YouTube creator. Some of her more popular music include Restored, The Miracle, and Risen. I love her work, and I got even more interested in her story when I read that she never intended to become a songwriter. 

I'm thrilled to share this interview with you today, and I apologize upfront for the laughter. She just kept making me laugh at the candid retelling of her journey from reluctant songwriter to YouTube success. I started off the interview by asking Shawna what she does for a living.

Shawna: Maybe that's a good place to start. I don't do this for a living. [chuckles] When I say that, it's just because my husband has been a chief sole breadwinner, and I didn't really get into songwriting, which is what I'm doing for the money. In fact, it wasn't really a career choice at all. I just felt compelled. I had written a few songs here and there, nothing super serious, but a few of them people liked, people enjoyed, and I just felt compelled to do more of that, and get it out there.

In fact, in 2008, I wrote in my scriptures along the side, “I have felt this prompting so many times why am I not doing it?” When you say, what do I do for a living? What I do is I write faith-based songs and put them on YouTube, and it has turned into a career. It's turned into a business, and I spend quite a bit of time at it now, but that's not how it started, and that's not what I had necessarily planned for my life. I will just tell you that in 2008-- we have five children, and our youngest son left to go on an LDS mission.

I had my dream job which was to be a full-time mom for all of those years, and I really didn't have a desire to do any other big side thing or to have a career or anything, but anyway, he left on his mission and I'm sitting there thinking, "Now what?" I could just fritter a lot of time away, or I could do something a little more meaningful, and this is what it ended up being.

Shelley: I love it. I'm going to come back to that, but let's talk about the nuts and bolts for a little bit. You had this prompting, or you wrote, why am I not doing it? Well, why weren't you doing it?

Shawna: Fear. That's absolutely it. It is super vulnerable to create something and put it out there. We used to not have a stage for this kind of thing. There wasn't one. I would've had to go and sing at cafes and stuff like that to build the audience that I have now. To create something and then put it in a forum, YouTube, anybody in the whole world could see it. I would say to my husband, "I've written a couple of decent songs, I think, but I'm not a songwriter." He kept encouraging me and saying, "You feel this and you feel it strongly. There's a reason, and the Lord isn't going to tell you to do this and then not support you, not help you."

Shelley: That's a really good point. You had written a couple of songs. At that point who heard them?

Shawna: My first real song, when I say real, I had written some fun songs for girls' camp, that kind of stuff, but my first real song was Do You Have Room. I wrote it for my family. I just wrote it because I had this experience a few days before Christmas, and I was sitting in our living room and I was reading a talk by Thomas S. Monson. He had said, so many people have room for this and this and this. They have room for their hobbies and their toys and their television and other things that they like, but no room for Christ.

I thought, "That would make the best song." Literally, it was three days before Christmas and I decided I'm going to write a song and play it on Christmas Eve for my family. That was the first real song. My family heard it. Literally, I thought, "That's it." My husband and my children, and then my mom and dad happened to be there that night. It would not have gone anywhere that song if my dad hadn't kept saying to me, "Have you done anything with that song?"

Almost every time I saw him, he'd say, "Have you done anything with that song?" I finally thought, "Okay, I need to do something to placate my dad." I just had it published into a paper copy, a nice piece of sheet music, and I gave it to him. Then he said, "Well, this is great, but you need to do more." [laughs] On a lark, I sent it to the LDS church for their songwriting contest, and it won. I was blown away. I was so surprised. That was the beginning of this, and then they performed it in a concert on Temple Square.

Then I thought, "Okay, now these people have heard it," but I still thought that nobody else was going to hear it. That was the end. Then my dad passed away that next fall, and literally, Shelley, I felt like I could hear him sing, "Have you done anything with that song?" 

I used to do sports videos for my kids' high school sports teams. I like editing videos. I sat down and put the song in the background and edited this little video, and it was played in a program in our neighborhood.

Afterward, my husband said, "Put it on YouTube." Well, I didn't even know what YouTube was, and I didn't have a YouTube account. I didn't even know what that meant. I was super naive. I thought, "Well, okay, I'll put it on YouTube, and then if anybody wants the sheet music, I can send it to him." I thought, "Maybe a few people will contact me." At the end of the video, I embedded my personal email. It said, "If you'd like a copy of the sheet music, email me at blah blah blah.

[laughter]

In a way that you can't remove it. It wasn't in the description, it was just right there on the video.

Shelley: It was part of the video.

Shawna: Yes.

Shelley: Oh, my Gosh.

Shawna: I had no expectations. I put it up, I sent it to seven people, and within a couple of weeks, it had a hundred thousand views.

Shelley: Oh, my gosh. How many emails did you get?

Shawna: Oh, hundreds of emails. I think I spent the entire Christmas season answering emails, not just sending the music to a hundred people at a time, but to answer every individual email. It was so great, but I had to take that video down.

Shelley: That is totally unadvisable. You went viral, and then you removed the content?

Shawna: Yes. Then people were mad at me. Well, this tells you how naive I was. I had just used content that didn't belong to me.

Shelley: Oh, pictures and stuff?

Shawna: Yes, and video. I thought, "Well, this is out there."

Shelley: How did that affect you? It was supposed to be such a positive thing, but you have all this backlash, did it ruin the experience for you at all?

Shawna: A little bit. Part of the story that I didn't tell you is that when I went to the concert where it was performed, the person who's sang, "Do You Have Room," I don't know if maybe he was a last-minute stand-in, but he butchered the song.

Shelley: Oh, no.

Shawna: He didn't get the words right, or the rhythm or the melody. It was literally unrecognizable. That was the moment where I came home. I told you I had had those copies printed. I literally picked them up and shoved them in the bottom box, through the back of the closet. I was like, "Oh, why did I do that?"

Shelley: Vulnerable like you said.

Shawna: Yes. Then I put it on YouTube, and I actually had to take it down before Christmas, because of the copyright issues. That was agonizing because there were people who were going to use it. This was not a good start. I made a ton of mistakes like that, but I think what kept me going was the fact that people liked that song. I had all kinds of people tell me how the song had inspired them to make more room for Jesus that day.

Shelley: What gets you to write another song?

Shawna: I went back to school. That's the answer. I was originally a piano major. Our three oldest boys, at the time, were at BYU, and I thought, "Oh, this will be fun. I'm going to finish my music degree," but I didn't want to practice the piano four hours a day. There's no point in doing that at that time in my life. They let me back into the music program. I ended up majoring in commercial music, or at the time, I think it was called Media music. As part of that, I had to write songs.

In fact, our very first songwriting class, our teacher gave us a story. That was a little bit of a broken-heart love story. He said, "I want you to go home and write a song about this." I thought, "I can't do that." [laughs] Anyway. I learned a lot. I learned so much going back to school. I think the best thing that I picked up there were friends, people who were actually doing the music thing and who were so talented, and most of them were young enough to be my children.

I was so thrilled and honored to be able to go to school with some of these people who showed me the ropes in such a kind way. I had this little group of songs that I had written for school, and I had to do a recital where I had 45 minutes of my own music. I had written several songs in that. I hadn't done anything with any of them except for Do You Have Room. My professor was so great, and he was very encouraging and said, "You should do something with some of these songs. They're good."

Then during that time, I was the primary music chorister, and basically, that's just the music director for a group of children in my own congregation. We had a theme every month at that time, and the theme for the month of August in the year I'm talking about was Jesus is the God of miracles. I thought, "Oh, I love that phrase. It's right out of the scriptures." 

I started looking for a song that had that phrase in it, and there wasn't one, or that I couldn't find one. I decided I would write one. At the time, I was going to be driving with one of our sons to Chicago because he was going to medical school. I thought, "Okay, it's 27 hours to Chicago, that should give me enough time to write a song."

Shelley: Oh my gosh.

Shawna: I wrote The Miracle in a car.

Shelley: It's so amazing to me, but it's such a beautiful and a powerful song. You wrote it for primary, but then what happens?

Shawna: Actually, when I came home from Chicago, I flew home. It was the next Sunday, John and I were on a walk. I'll never forget it because I had put Do You Have Room back up and it wasn't nearly as powerful as the original because it didn't have all that beautiful video that I had stolen. It just had what I could get for free, and it had maybe 500,000 views. It seemed like a lot to me at the time because I wasn't really a YouTuber, but it's really nothing compared to real YouTubers.

Anyway, John and I were on a walk, and we were actually up the canyon. He said, "Okay, sing that song for me again that you wrote when you went to Chicago." I sang it. He said, "You need to put it on YouTube, and it will have way more views." I said, "No way." He said, "Yes, it will." It probably has five times as many views as Do You Have Room. That was a song that just spoke to people. I've had so many stories of miracles surrounding that song that people have sent me and I've just been so grateful and humbled by the fact that that song came through revelation. Just 100%.

I can remember the moment even. We're driving to Chicago and there's a lot of cornfields between here. I was somewhere in Kansas, just looking at all these cornfields thinking, "Okay, I've started with all these miracles that we hear about when we read about and talk about Jesus, but how do I get those miracles to be real to the children who are seeing this song 2000 years later?" In fact, with His hands, he healed the leper. A lot of kids I have heard sing leopard because they don't know what a leper is.

Nobody has ever seen anybody walk on the water and so it's like, "What is it that makes these miracles be significant and important to the children?" Then it dawned on me, "Well, duh, the miracle that the song should be about is the Atonement of Jesus Christ and that daily, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute change it makes in your life when you know that truth and, that is the miracle the song should be about."

Then, Shelley, it just wrote itself once I had that idea. It was easy. Actually, the son that I was traveling with, has really, really good taste in music. I finished the words and I read the words to him, and he goes, "Okay, now, come up with a melody." I kept coming up with melodies, and I probably sang 10 or 12 melodies to him. Then I came up with this melody, and I sang it to him and he said, "That's it mom." He goes, "That's it, don't change a thing. That's the melody."

It's funny that I wrote it in a car and you're thinking, "Wow, that's weird," but I was in the perfect place with no distractions, and this son of ours that was willing to just help me get to the exact right place in the song and it all came together.

Shelley: Coming from the outside, though, as painful as the experience was with that other song, you had to learn with that other song, so that when The Miracle came about, you were ready for it. What if the Miracle is the song that ended up going on YouTube, coming back down, people singing it incorrectly? You just had to learn with that other song so you could be prepared for this song.

Shawna: I have never thought of that before.

Shelley: Really?

Shawna: That’s never, ever, ever crossed my mind, but I love that thought. I had been prepared in a bunch of what you might think is disparate ways. Nothing that would normally come together like for example, doing high school sports videos.

Shelley: Yes, the fact that that was connected is pretty mind-boggling.

Shawna: Yes. Shelley, if I had had to go pay a videographer when I first started, it's already really expensive enough to go into a studio and record something professionally and pay people to help you do that and get a really good singer and stuff. Then the second step after you've done all of that is to do a video, and if I'd have had to go get a videographer, I might not have done it all, because it would have seemed extraordinarily expensive for what I thought at the time was a little hobby.

Because I knew how to do that, that came together, I went back to school, I was forced to write some music, and I enjoyed it. Then, I have this husband who he's so awesome. He's just been my biggest fan and yet at the same time my most brutally honest critic. He will say, "You're not there yet on that song."

Shelley: Really?

Shawna: Yes, and I am so grateful for that. That has helped me more than anything. The Lord blessed me with all of these things, and then basically had to just keep pushing.

Shelley: Oh my gosh, I love that. What does it look like now? Do you just go with the flow? Do you have a cadence? What is it like?

Shawna: Such a great question. I did go with the flow for a long time, and I only really probably put a song or two out a year. After the first 10 years from the time I put, Do You Have Room out, which I think was in 2009, after the first 10 years I maybe had 15, 20 songs out there, and now I have almost 50.

Shelley: Wow.

Shawna: In the past, I waited until an idea came to me. Then if I had this little epiphany, I would write one. What it looks like now in my life is that I'm working with a New York Times bestselling author. His name is BJ Fogg, and he has not released anything yet, but he wrote a book called Tiny Habits, and he contacted me to see if I would be willing to write his method into songs for children so that he could roll out his method to them.

I'm working on that, and he's been so so great to work with. I've so enjoyed that. Then I'm working on a song for a concert up in Salt Lake that is going to be sung by a bunch of young adults, and then I'm writing New Testament songs since our focus is New Testament for next year. We did Old Testament last year.

Shelley: In the beginning, you were doing everything yourself. Is that still the case?

Shawna: That's a great question too. I have a list of all the things that have to be done, to actually go from blank page to YouTube release, and it's long. There are so many steps. When I started, I only offloaded the things that I just thought I absolutely can't do that. I do not have the skills to, for example, record something professionally. Things that I am not equipped to do, those are the only things I had other people do because that's all I wanted to afford. Now, I really only do the things that I love to do and I offload everything else.

Shelley: I think that's the best use of your time because then you're able to use your talents and the people that you bring into the project are talented in their ways.

Shawna: I do the songwriting and then I take it to the arranger, and then I have a studio that I work with and I get a really good singer. There's so many good singers out there, that I've just been so fortunate to be able to use their talents and then I hire a videographer.

Shelley: What was the moment that it felt okay to charge for your work?

Shawna: Oh, that's another good question. This is why you're doing the podcast. You know how to ask the right questions. At first, I didn't feel good about charging and I gave, Do You Have Room away and I gave The Miracle away for free at first. Then I just thought, "Okay, I have two choices here. One is I can start charging for this music and do more of it, or I can keep giving it away and only do a little." I can't even tell you how expensive just doing one song is, so that's what pushed me to the point where I thought, "I have to charge for this, or I can't keep doing it."

A lot of people charge for their religious content. I don't have a problem paying for a beautiful piece of artwork of The Savior. I don't think that this person should give that artwork away just because it's of The Savior, I am paying for the time they put into it and for all of the time they put into becoming the artist that they are, which was thousands and thousands of hours. I had to talk myself into the fact that it was okay to charge money.

Shelley: What advice do you have for an artist? Doesn't have to be a songwriter, but any type of an artist who would like to do something similar to what you've done to put their art out there into the world.

Shawna: I would say first of all, that the Lord gave them that talent for a reason, and this is where the parable of the talents has taken on new meaning to me because people have these talents and it is really safer and easier to just hide it. In fact, John used to tease me that people would say to me, "Oh, did you write that song?" I would mumble my answer because I was embarrassed. I didn't want people to know. John would say, “Shawna, Come on!”

Shawna: I didn't want to appear as though I was flaunting this which is silly.

Shelley: It is, but I get it.

Shawna: If you've got this talent, there was a reason you have it, you can go out and share it in a small way to start with and the Lord will multiply that just like he did the loaves and fishes.

Shelley: Like your husband said, he wouldn't have given you this prompting if he wasn't going to support you through it.

Shawna: Absolutely. It is frightening and for the first several years when I got close to releasing a song on YouTube, I was a basket case.

Shelley: I'll bet.

Shawna: I would cry, ridiculous and I'm not really a super emotional person, but I would turn into one. I would say, "Oh, this is a terrible song, I'm not putting it out there." It was ridiculous, but I had to keep doing that. Just keep saying, "Okay, I'm just going to put it out there and have faith, but it'll be okay." Now at this point I'm like, there's lots of people who aren't going to like this, but that can't stop me.

Shelley: Do you have to resist the urge to compare yourself to other songwriters, musicians, piano players, singers?

Shawna: Sure. I think I do that on a regular basis and I don't feel competitive. There's all the room in the world for good content, but there are so many times, Shelley, where I think I'm a fraud, I have just pulled the wool over people's eyes for long enough and someday they're going to find out that I really don't know what I'm doing.

Shelley: Oh, I feel the same way. We all do. Oh my goodness.

Shawna: You asked about advice and I would give one more piece of advice to people who are trying to do this. Surround yourself with a few people who will give you the truth about what you're doing, and hold onto them. When they give you the truth, accept it and go back even if you have to take some time to think through what they said and not be offended, because they will help you more than any other people.

Shelley: Right. I love that. Can you tell me about a leap of faith you had to take to get where you are now?

Shawna: I've talked about leaps of faith all along, I think maybe the biggest leap was to go and do it again after the bomb of Do You Have Room, because I then could see, oh, people could butcher this song, people could not like it. People could say, "Oh, I found out that you belonged to this particular church that I don't like, and so we're not going to sing your song after all."

All of those I could make mistakes and then be embarrassed and have to tell people, "Sorry, I stole this content so I had to take it down," and all of those mistakes that I had made, I could have just said, "I am so done. I tried this and I did it because I felt like the Lord was revealing this path to me. I felt like this was the next step and then it just didn't turn out well, so why would I try again?" That's probably the biggest.

Shelley: Then what is an unexpected blessing? Something you just could not see for yourself in having the courage to start this business?

Shawna: It's just been so wonderful and sweet to hear the experiences from other people that they have had with one of my songs. They're so varied and making these friends literally all across the world singing my songs. There's a sweet little nun that lives in a convent in Poland, Kraków, Poland, and she sings all of my songs. She learns them, and she plays the guitar and sings them, and then she sends me recordings of them.

Shelley: Oh, that's so sweet.

Shawna: It's so sweet. I've made friends with her and I love her. I had surgery in January, and she sent me a recording of herself singing one of my songs the night before my surgery to tell me that she was praying for me and she just wanted to give me a lift and let me know that she was thinking about me. Stuff like that is so satisfying. That's why I keep writing. It isn't the money, there's an impact on people's lives.

Shelley: All right. My final question is how have you seen the hand of God in your career?

Shawna: In every song, I could tell you a miracle that happened in every single song, because I just feel like I am absolutely not alone in this process. I pray and I try to really follow the spirit, and some songs I wouldn't say that I had revealed to me or that just came. Some songs take months and I don't feel that as much, but honestly, I've had so many miracles. Maybe I'll just tell you one. 

I wrote Risen a few Easters ago, and I had tried two, three Easters in a row to write a new song. I had actually gotten to the point in my life where I was dealing with quite a little bit of anxiety, which I had never dealt with before, and I was learning what this anxiety thing is all about. Boy, I really struggled to work on the music because I would second-guess everything that I was doing.

I wanted to put out a piece of music again for Easter and it was March. I had told myself, "It's too late, it's not going to happen." Then I went to a fireside that was given by Janice Kapp Perry, and some people will know her as a person who's written a ton of religious music and a lot of songs that we sing in our church often. She's just so good and she's done so many great things. Anyway, I went to this fireside, which I wasn't even going to go to because of the anxiety, but a friend of mine called me and said, "Hey, come to this fireside with me." I thought, "Okay, I'll go."

She said something in that fireside that I just thought, "Oh, she is talking to me." She said, "We cannot let our fears get to us." It just seemed like it flashed up on a billboard in front of my eyes that phrase. I went home with that and I thought, "Okay, I'm going to try to write this Easter song. I'm just going to try. That's all I can do." 

The next morning I started and a melody just came into my mind and I was playing this melody, and my husband's getting ready for work. He's in the other room and he called out to me and he said, "That is a great melody. Keep it." I thought, "Oh, okay, this is it. I can work with this." I started writing words and in three or four days, I had this song written, and it might be my best-selling.

Shelley: Really?

Shawna: Yes. Then we went to record it-- to do the video, and we had so many problems with the video. We lost light in the beautiful stained glass window. Kids didn't show up in the right attire because they got the wrong message and that was totally my fault. I literally sent a mother to Kohl’s to get the right clothing for people. We couldn't hear the recording, so the kids couldn't stay with it. It was an absolute disaster. I thought, "This isn't going to work." It turned out to be a beautiful video.

I will just tell you that I have seen the hand of the Lord over and over and over and over to the point where now if I can't get the words to something, I just know that those words will come, even if it's when I'm walking into the recording studio.

Shelley: Wow. You've developed that trust.

Shawna: I have and it's because this happens over and over and over again, and I just know that the Lord is there. If it doesn't come, it's okay. I find myself thinking, "Well, this is not one of the songs that the Lord really wants to magnify.”

Shelley: That's an interesting perspective because you started off the interview by sharing that fear is what stopped you from putting stuff out there. You had to overcome fear a second time, and now you're to that place where you're confident enough to just put out what you have. I appreciate that. Then also not comparing yourself with other artists. Finally, the value in taking criticism, constructive criticism from people you trust. Shawna, before we wrap up, is there anything else you would like to share with us?

Shawna: You mentioned something that's super important to this whole journey. In fact, it's the reason that I'm still on the journey, is that I went from fear to faith. I had to learn that by acting, by doing, by keeping doing things that were vulnerable. I can't tell you how much I have learned about faith in this whole process. It's so powerful. The more that you can hone that ability to just go forward and act with faith, the more you can do and the more the Lord can help you do.

Shelley: I love that. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Shawna: It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

Shelley: There's almost nothing more that I can add to this interview except to say how much I want to share it with my friends who long to create. I always say that you're building your future, whether you know it or not. Shawna has seen a song come together in a matter of days after stewing over it for an extended period of time. I've seen people figure out the career they were born to do after they've spent years dabbling in a hundred different ways, only to find out it wasn't dabbling.

It was picking up the skills necessary to be ready for their own miracle moment. Just as Shawna had done something so simple as putting together sports videos for her kids, having no idea at the time that she would one day be a legit YouTube success in the very best of ways. Imagine being able to share your faith online in a world that is in desperate need of great content that only you are qualified to create. Take heart my friends, and just know that even if you fail at first, it will be for your ultimate gain if you let God guide you from fear to faith as well.

Thank you again to Shawna, for sharing her journey, and thank you for sharing your time with me. 

Thank you for listening to the Faithful Career Moves Podcast. If you want to know more about how to connect your natural talents and abilities to job opportunities and business ideas, then visit our website at faithfulcareermoves.com.