Last week Pharrell Williams was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey about his hit song “Happy”. She showed him a video montage of people around the world dancing to his song and enjoying the music he had created. The result was that Pharrell burst into tears! In a moment of encouragement Oprah said to him “It’s being used for something that’s greater than yourself…”

During the making of my Sirens and Other Mysteries EP there were a lot of personal setbacks and heartbreak that seemed to get in the way of writing and recording the project. I wrote the song If That’s The Way after I had a miscarriage, it wasn’t an easy song to write and I certainly didn’t think that I would ever be able to sing it in public. In fact, during rehearsals for the recording I sobbed everything time I went to open my mouth. I’d never had this situation with a song before and it worried me; could I actually be that honest with people and let them see my grief in public? Quite frankly I didn’t want to cry on stage in front of a lot of people!

As a consequence of this, I toyed with the idea of taking the song off the CD and right up to the last minute I still hadn’t committed to letting the song go public. Whenever I thought about emailing the producer to say “delete it!” I couldn’t quite do it, something was stopping me. What I didn’t know at the time was that it had the same potential to be used “for something greater than myself”; I just had to move out of the way so that other people could benefit from this. Since I released the song, and the video about it I’ve had an amazing and overwhelming reaction from people: something that I didn’t expect! So even though being honest about where I’m at is scary it was worth it in the end.