Colbie Caillat began singing with serious intent at the age of 11 after hearing Lauryn Hill’s version of Killing Me Softly. “I think her voice is absolutely beautiful and it made me want to start singing so I entered a talent show and of course I sang a Lauryn Hill song.” As she grew older, however, her father offered one crucial piece of advice. It was all very well having a great voice, he pointed out, the people who command real respect in the music business are the songwriters. “I thought about that for a long time”, she says.
In truth, it took some time coming - but when it did, the floodgates opened. “I needed to play an instrument to write songs and although I had piano lessons as a kid, it never went anywhere because I was never in the right state of mind to practice,” she recalls. Surprisingly, it wasn’t until she was 19 - little more than two years ago -that she eventually took up the acoustic guitar. “I wrote my fist song after my very first guitar lesson and then it just all flowed out,” she recalls. “If something’s biting me I hold it in because that’s the kind of person I am. Then it comes out in songs. Things builds up inside of me and I’ll write three songs in a weekend. It’s a release. I don’t choose what to write about. It’s just there.”
Along the way, she found two key collaborators in Mikal Blue, who hired her when she was 15 to sing some songs he’d written for a fashion show, and singer/songwriter Jason Reeves. Together, they helped to craft the songs on “Coco,” which Blue also produced. “The songs always start put with me,” she explains of the collaborative process. “I’ll be sitting around at home getting bored and something will come out. Then if I get stuck, I can take it to Mikal or Jason. Having people you trust to bounce ideas around keeps the creativity flowing.”
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