Nova Scotia musician and Mount Allison University student Clare Siobhan has always written fantastic music, but this summer one song in particular really took off:
“So the the press that I’ve been doing this summer has been about a song I wrote called ‘Ten Speed Bike.’ I’ve been calling it a long distance relationship song with a twist, because it sort of started to be about all of the different changes that were happening in mid to late March, and one of the changes that happened was, first of all, the semester ended, and then . . . exactly one week later my boyfriend had to return to Toronto to be with [his] family. At the time we were sort of joking, like, because he needed a new bike to get around town [that] you know what, the bike makes up for it. It’s fine we can do long distance because he’s got a beautiful bicycle. And so I wrote the song because I was a bit frustrated with everything and I was missing him. I submitted it for a first song contest by the Toronto songwriting school, and I won the contest, which was cool. . . So there’s a there’s been a bit of press on that song lately.”
Clare found herself doing a lot of songwriting over the summer as a way to help cope with the reality of the pandemic:
“Well, at the beginning of the summer I was wondering should I even bother trying to get a job? Like, what if I just stay home and make music, and then I realized I just started to go crazy while I was doing nothing. I’m someone who, left with too much free time and not enough structure I just started to dissolve. And another thing is in a global pandemic, the majority of people I know have been feeling a lot of emotions, and the majority of people I know who create things and write songs have been writing because they don’t know where else to put their feelings. That’s sort of been me, I’ve written a bunch over the summer. I don’t know how many of them I’ll release, but it’s just something that sort of has occurred as a result of all of the turmoil that the pandemic has been stirring up.”
Clare is also currently working towards a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in psychology, so I asked if she could ever see herself combining her music and psychology pursuits:
“That is such a good question. I don’t know exactly where I would go with that. I do sometimes consider music therapy because I think that would be extremely cool, but I think right now the best way that I’m currently combining them is just by keeping myself in choirs, just because you know on all those choir Facebook pages they tell you [all the] psychological and physical benefits of choral singing. I just read up on those and I’m like, Okay, this is why I should say in choir, but I would love to incorporate music into some sort of practice, especially because what I’m thinking of doing after undergrad, hopefully is I would like to apply to a speech language pathology program. I would be so fascinated to see if there’s anybody currently integrating music into speech therapy, because I’ve heard that there are some people with certain speech difficulties who don’t have those same speech difficulties when you get them to sing. Because, the sort of bits in the brain where those things are localized, like speech and singing, are on different hemispheres, I’m fairly certain. [reference:
https://online.ucpress.edu/mp/article-abstract/24/1/23/62306 ]
So I think there seems to be some sort of evidence somewhere for music helping people have more fluent speech, and I think that would be a really cool thing to investigate. But yeah, long story short, I haven’t 100% figured out what I’m going to do with it yet. I don’t know if I can use it, or if they’re gonna stay very separate in my life, but I think that would be a really interesting avenue, especially if I could find a way to bring it into speech therapy or some other sort of therapeutic practice.”
You can listen to Christina Acton’s full interview with Clare Siobhan here:
And you can follow her music (and watch a music video Clare and Christina made together) here:
https://claresiobhan.bandcamp.com/releases
https://www.instagram.com/claresiobhanmusic/
