Taylor Acorn: A Return To Your Roots
Returning to your roots is a saying that some might find cliché, yet the majority will agree is a tried-and-true statement in life. No matter where you go and what you do in life, a small part of you will hold onto something from your childhood and teen years, whether it be a fashion style you admired but feared to try, an aspiration that might have been viewed as unattainable, or a hobby you found yourself walking away from. No matter the scenario, you find yourself reminiscing and eventually bring it back into your adult life as a new permanent feature. That’s how TAYLOR ACORN returned to her roots as a pop-punk singer-songwriter.
Originally her music career started after a major move to Nashville to become a country musician where she connected with producer Dan Swank [CASSADEE POPE, ALL TIME LOW] who worked on ACORN’s first few releases. After a while, the two then bonded over a mutual love of early 2000s pop-punk and the shift began where Taylor began to release acoustic covers and then eventually original songs fully embracing the genre she loved so much in her teenage years.
Fast forward to now, and TAYLOR ACORN’s newest record, Poster Child, has come out, her first album to be released whilst signed to Fearless Records after years of being an independent artist. We sat down with Taylor a few days after the album release where she confessed that she was still on an overwhelmed high now that the record is out for the world to hear. “I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. I have been so excited to release this album for quite some time, so for it to finally be out with everybody and seeing the reactions, it seems like it’s going really well. It’s been crazy, I love this album so much and I hope that when people listen to it they can hear how much love and time we put in.”
As mentioned, TAYLOR ACORN started out as a country singer, a genre renowned for it’s form of storytelling through lyrics. It’s something that Taylor has always enjoyed when it comes to songwriting, and in fact she believes that there’s a lot of crossover between both country and pop-punk music. “I love a good story and I feel like that’s what I admired, for example, on MAYDAY PARADE’s first record, Tales Told By Dead Friends, there’s something that was so special about the way that they had told stories but you could also take any of those songs and transpose it into a country production. I thought it was so cool that they aligned in that way. I definitely think that the country writing in that style and what I had learned over those first few years of being in Nashville has stuck with me. Even when I was writing country, I felt like I had a very pop-punk underlying tone.”
When listening to Poster Child, to say it’s of a deeply personal nature would be a dreadful understatement given the themes that explore both childhood nostalgia and navigation of adult life, with a deep longing to return to simpler times. For Taylor, writing these types of lyrics is something of a second nature to her when it comes to her songwriting.
“I feel like everything that I write comes from my own personal experiences or people that I’ve witnessed, or surround myself with, just stories that they’ve gone through. I do a lot of internalising, and with this record in particular we had been on tour for two years, I had put out a record (Survival In Motion) last year, and I felt like everything was very rushed. While I was finishing up my record, and playing Greener every night, I was going through some really…”
At this point, Acorn paused a moment when thinking of the right words to say before concluding with, “I had a few things going on in my own personal life that I didn’t really have time to sit back and process because I was on tour or I was promoting a record.”
“There was a lot of things going on and with this record (Poster Child) in particular, it was the very first time I actually had a few months to really sit with myself and process my emotions and really think about what I want to say as an artist, first and foremost, the music I want to make, process what I was going through and really just focus on myself. I think that’s why this record feels so special to me because it’s all the inner workings I’ve had to do the last seven months before releasing all of this.”
During our chat, TAYLOR ACORN talked about how songwriting was a more effective way of explaining her feelings, something that she has been working on in therapy. In her own words. “There’s always an element of being afraid to release all of your dirty laundry to the world, but for me it’s always been a healthy outlet. Over the years I’ve really had to work being honest with myself and not internalising my feelings, and music has always been an amazing outlet for me in that aspect. For me it feels very healing to be able to write songs, but then there’s also this like ‘oh if I have this situation in a relationship, or if I’m happy, or if I’m this…’ are people going to resonate with my music? There’s always this underlying fear whenever you’re putting out anything you’re putting your heart on your sleeve.”
Poster Child is out now via Fearless Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS128 here.
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