[LOCUTOR]

Track fourteen, unit six, this is music to my ears

[MESFIN FEKADU]

[…] Thanks Ivon. I'm Mesfin Fekadu and this is Off Script with the Hollywood Reporter song writers Round Table. How are you guys doing?

[ALL]

Good.

[MESFIN FEKADU]

Thank you. I'm so excited that you all could be here. Such talented group of people, I know some of you know each other, some are probably just meeting today.

[ALL]

Yeh.

[MESFIN FEKADU]

Perfect. Well, I wanted to ask uh, as songwriters, do you remember the first song or lyric you wrote. I don't know how old you were, but want to hear some of that backstory. How about you Cynthia.

[CYNTHIA ERIVO]

Yeah. I was sixteen, and I wrote a song called "maybe". I think it was given to, like a South African girl group or something.

[OLÍVIA RODRIGO]

I mean I guess the first song that I wrote like on piano proper hum, I was probably fourteen or fifteen and I wrote this feminist anthem called Superman, about how I didn't need Superman to come and save me. Yeah, start em young so...

[MESFIN FEKADU]

On the right track.

[DUA LIPA]

Gosh, I mean, when I think about mine it was completely different. I was always like making up songs when I was really little and when I was about four or five years old, I made up the song. Albanian was my first language and so I sang in Albanian and it was a song that I'd made for my mom, and I'd walk around the house and I'd be like "When I grow up, can I borrow your shoes, and when I grow up, can I wear your dress, and when I grow up like can I be just like you". And it actually just, like, stuck around, it's kind of the one thing that like at home we just always remind ourselves of this, yeah, so.

[MESFIN FEKADU]

I love that, it's adorable. How about you John.

[JOHN]

Oh! Well, I was doing a lot of music instrumentally for many years, and I started writing lyrics for a Shakespeare Play, that wanted songs in the play. I was probably about, uh, twenty-one, and I started writing it, and I was like, man, characters and worlds and the expression of all these interconnected relationships, and how I can make all these sounds come together. That was the end of it. I love that stuff.

[BILLIE EILISH]

Yeah, I'm trying to think... I think that like what comes to mind is probably when I was like eight or something and it was, like, it was like "I'm going down, down, down into the black hole, sweeping up your soul". And I was like [sing] today. I was just like I was like it's tight.

[MESFIN FEKADU]

Were you going through something at the time as an eight-year-old?

[BILLIE EILISH]

No. Listen I was writing stories, man. I feel like the first song that I wrote was probably when I was like hum eleven (ish), or no, now that I think about it, I think I was, okay, I was six, and it was me and my friend. We were playing Ukulele and it was a song about ukeleles, I don't know. Whatever.