We spoke to the second year who has a single available on iTunes today

Most of Rachel Braig’s friends at UVA didn’t even know she wrote music

After keeping her music career mostly a secret since last year, second year Rachel Braig is out in the open about her passion for songwriting which has landed her a deal with Chris Brown’s production group.

‘The Other Side’ is available to download today on iTunes, and is the most recent of three songs she’s produced this year.

Rachel will be songwriting and interning in Nashville this summer.

“This summer I wrote 20 songs and compiled them to a producer out in Nashville,” said Rachel, who is from Williamsburg, VA. They’ve recorded the top three in a new project they’re working on together, which has a sound “totally different” from what Rachel is used to doing.

“It’s kind of this whole new thing – I am reinventing myself through this music, too,” Rachel said.

Opening up about ‘The Other Side’ is “the first time I’ve come out to the UVA community… A lot of people didn’t even know that I wrote music so it’s kind of a new thing and I’m really excited about it.”

Rachel hasn’t assigned a specific meaning to this new song, but says it’s about “any college student experience.”

“I like to write music and let the people, the listeners decide what it’s about,” she said. “I never really like to tell people what the song’s about because I think it speaks to different people differently… you can interpret it as you want to.”

With the help of her piano and her mom, she wrote the song in a single day to meet the demands of her producer who needed a final song for her new collection: “I was playing around with some melodies, and it kind of just hit me and I knew what I wanted and then the lyrics came after.”

Rachel got into music when she was a 12 years old. She was grounded, and with nothing but a piano in her room to amuse herself she figured out how to play ‘Apologize’ by OneRepublic. “I taught myself through just experience.”

Around that same time, she was encouraged by her parents to start songwriting when her father was diagnosed with cancer. She was inspired to write a song about him that she called ‘Always You’ which was picked up by a producer in New York and is still available on iTunes.

“My dad’s like my best friend and we’re very musically related – our favorite band is Coldplay, we go to every concert we can together.”

Despite being pitched as a singer, Rachel aspires to one day be a songwriter: “I do love singing but…I speak more through lyrics and I find my passion in writing so ideally my goals are to be a songwriter with a publishing deal.”

She notes that there are several songwriters behind each song you hear on the radio.

She has attended summer songwriting programs at NYU and Berklee College of Music. Now though, she is managing songwriting during the school year, and commuted to the recording studio every weekend in January and February.

“It was a lot, but it’s worth it,” she said. “I know one day down the line that’s what I want to do, that’s where I want to be. And to get there you gotta start pushing yourself now, or else you’re never going to make it anywhere.”

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