It started when sophomore Olivia Gomez googled “producers near me” and made a phone call from her hotel bathroom on her freshman year Spring Break vacation. 

“I was so nervous, but I thought ‘you have to start somewhere, might as well just call this producer!’” she recalled. “I did it without telling anyone either. I was on vacation at the time and I literally just remember locking myself in the bathroom. My family was napping, so I figured I’d call this man and see how it went. I thought I’d get a secretary or something, but I got the producer himself, and thank God he was very open to meeting with someone he’d never heard of or met.” 

Gomez started songwriting in December 2020, just months prior to making that phone call. Singing and performing has been a part of her life for as long as she can remember, and since she strives to pursue music professionally — releasing albums and touring — she wanted to try her hand at writing. 

“I started writing in December of freshman year, so we were at home with so much time on our hands…. I was going through a lot mental health-wise, so I used songs to cope with it,” Gomez said. “Songwriting helped me get out a bunch of emotions I wasn’t sure how to talk about. I use a lot of metaphors and symbolism and a lot of my songs are about anxiety and things that I was struggling with at the time [I wrote them]. Music helped me express those feelings in a clearer way to my friends and family — they were able to understand more what I was talking about when I wrote it down in song.” 

At the time of her meeting with her producer, Gomez had about 12 songs written, the most upbeat of which was (what would be her debut single) “Let’s Fall in Love.” She and her dad took a trip to the city in June 2021, and Gomez was — to put it lightly — nervous.

“I was going to throw up,” she laughed. “I assumed I would have to sing all my songs, so I did come prepared and practiced a lot. I walked in, and almost instantly he was like ‘alright. Let’s see what you’ve got to sing.’  We went through the songs one by one and before I sang [each one] he asked me how I wrote it and what was the inspiration behind it. I sang some of them three or four times so he could really get a feel [for my style]. It was a lot, but it was a short meeting.” 

While she didn’t expect “Let’s Fall in Love,” to be her producer’s pick to drop first, she was excited about recording it and, moreover, overwhelmed by the support she received. 

“When it came out, [the response was] was very, very positive,” Gomez said. “I’ll be honest, I was scared. I thought the response would be weird. But right before it dropped, since it was around the time of the [annual St. Bart’s] Italian Festival, I had so many like people who I didn’t really know coming up to me and telling me how they were going to stay up with their friends and listen to my song and how they were so excited to hear it and just all this stuff. I was terrified. I was shaking but it was honestly one of the coolest things that ever happened. I got so many videos of people dancing with their friends and singing along. I was so happy, genuinely.” 

Gomez plans to continue pursuing music as a hopeful career path and as a means of self-expression. 

“Music helps me express myself in a way that I don’t think regular words can,” she said. “When I get really anxious about something, all my thoughts are scrambled in my head. Writing songs has been a way to get everything in a straight line and to just really like understand how I’m feeling in a way I couldn’t without it.” 

Gomez’s single “Let’s Fall in Love,” is available to stream on all platforms!