THE FODDER:
Back in 2004, I had just gone through an epic breakup. And for me, that’s when songwriting kicks into high gear as my number one coping mechanism.
Songs are my catharsis, my way to process emotions, and experiences.
And for better or worse, my other coping mechanism is fresh love. So I dove straight into three more real-life stories, stuffing love in the wound.
And whenever I try and understand what's going on, I write.
THE INSPIRATION;
I’m a lover of reading musical autobiography - but always find it lacking the personal narrative from which each lyric was born. I always want to know - if this song sprang from a real experience (as mine typically do), what was it? Tell me the story!
So I started writing in my journal and thought, why don’t I tell my love stories and show the main character (me) writing the songs within the story - so the reader can journey along in the mind of a songwriter and experience the songwriting process first-hand.
I also read (and adored) a lot of memoir and fictional shorts about relationships and love (like Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston), but never with a songwriting main character.
So I set out to write the book I always wanted to read: The memoir of a songwriter that showed the actual stories leading into the lyrics and included the finished song at the end of each story.
THE PROCESS:
I didn’t have a band or a studio at the time, so I thought, I’ll just have other recording artists cover each song in their own way. I planned to release the illustrated book episodically, each chapter ending in a song covered by multiple artists.
This was before social media was really a thing, and websites were hard to build. We built a simple site in HTML and to get covers done, I’d find artists via Craigslist, word of mouth, and finally, via MySpace. My illustrator friend, Amy Kliever, did all of the original illustrations and site graphics.
I’d record an example of the melody on a 4-track cassette in my bathroom and literally mail it - via snail mail - to the artists. I’d then have them record and burn a CD to send back! Sometimes they mailed it from across the globe to a PO Box, and sometimes I drove to somewhere like a bar in Santa Cruz, to pick it up by hand, in a manila envelope, like a spy transmission.
The one issue was that I had been struggling to make the demos fast or well enough on my own in the bathroom. So I’d started a band (also via Craigslist) in order to teach them the songs from The Story of Sadie and use their recordings as the example demos to “speed up the project”.
We kicked it off with one chapter: Missing Piece, and 6 vastly different covers of the song by indie artists. We had submissions from artists like a Scottish folksinger, a dreampop band from Santa Cruz, a 60’s Rock band from San Francisco, two Bay Area singer-songwriters, and one from my own band, Blue Rabbit. The six covers sounded nothing alike and I was in LOVE with this magical fascinating collaboration!
And just after launching, we lost the entire original project - the entire draft of the book, and all the submitted covers. I had everything backed up on my macbook - which crashed, and MySpace - which also crashed. If you haven’t read about it, MySpace had a massive server error/crash and they accidentally wiped out millions of tracks irreversibly, including all of The Story of Sadie (then called Story of Sadie Jones). Between that and my hard drive failure, The Story of Sadie was wiped out of existence.
Well, the band Blue Rabbit became a 9-piece band that stuck together for 14+ years and we did indeed learn and cover a lot of the songs……but it was NOT fast. In fact, it was so slow, and so totally engrossing and fun, that I just focused on them for over a decade and dropped The Story of Sadie project altogether.
THE REBIRTH:
And so finally, 18 years later (just now, in 2022), I decided to re-launch my favorite project of all-time - this musical memoir of a songwriter loving four different ‘boys’. I guess they were technically men, but we seem so young looking back.
Luckily, I remember what happened, and I still have the songs.
So I’m re-writing the book from scratch and using the now totally improved power of social media and the internet to reach artists and readers all over the world.
The Story of Sadie - stories and songs - are written by me, Heather Anderson. But visual art can be submitted by artists everywhere, and songs can be covered and submitted by recording arists everywhere.
We’re releasing the writing here on Substack to build a readership and creating little ‘audiobook’ videos on TikTok using recordings of me reading aloud and proccess videos of the illustrations being drawn. (Have yet to release one, so we shall see how that goes.)
Excited to finally see this project through and hope you’ll join us in reading along.
CONTRIBUTING ART:
If you’d like to illustrate anything you read, or record one of the songs, just please reach out to hello@heatherlynnanderson.com.
No songs have yet been publicly released, but I’m just starting to put together the backend “materials” you’ll need - as in backstory, lyrics, chords, and recorded examples for melody.
The Story of Sadie currently includes 4 love stories and 14 songs, though we may add more or cut some. We shall see!
SUPPORTING THE PROJECT:
Read, Subscribe. Share. Donate. We appreciate each of you. <3
Thank you so much for reading along and participating! And if you are able to support this project by subscribing, every paid subscription will go toward the marketing and production of the project, helping us to amplify and feature all contributing artists. First mission: 75 paid subscribers to fund our TikTok/Audio production team. <3
We also appreciate free subscriptions!
So glad you’re here. <3
xo
Heather