Juliera didn’t want to write a song about her broken marriage, wasn’t even thinking about writing about that.
“I was trying to write something else because I’m like, ‘Whatever.’ It’s not worth writing about.”
But what came out was the second song she has released, “Let It Ache,” a beautiful ballad that starts slow and dreamy, with acoustic guitar and a question, asked softly by Juliera, singing in her lower register, not angry or accusative, just wanting to know:
Why darling why
Did you have to ruin what we had
Home baby home
Doesn’t feel safe no more
Then a driving drum beat kicks in, underlying the insistent melody as her voice soars, declaring her freedom:
Don’t want you no more
Going it alone
You left me no choice
It has only been out a little while and has already gotten more than 270,000 streams on Spotify. Her first-ever release, a dance song called “Hero,” dropped a few weeks before “Let It Ache” and has amassed almost 360,000 streams.
She has written more than a thousand songs and sold many of them through Fiverr, a gig she started to earn money for college.
“So, here’s the thing,” she said. “When I first started writing songs, I was writing for other people, right? And then eventually I started writing for myself, even though I wasn’t recording them. I was just writing them and putting them away. And then time passes, and during the time I was married, I wasn’t really doing anything. After that, I started writing again. Then I went to the studio, and I started recording.”
That was this year, May, and when she had 10 songs recorded, she decided it was time to start letting them out into the public.
“I can’t just be recording and recording and recording. I have to put things out, too, right? So, okay, the first one I released was ‘Hero,’ because my son loves that song so much. He’s always dancing to it, always asking me to replay it. Then, my mom really loves a bunch of them, but she said I really should release this one.”
“Let It Ache” — once it was written, against her will, so to speak, and recorded — was planned as the fourth release. It is a song about the end of her marriage, “and it’s a hard decision.”
“You love this person. That’s why you got married in the first place. And you have a child with this person. But the situation is, when someone is abusive to you — I don’t want to be one of those women who’s going to stay, and then my son grows up to think something like this is normal. And you know what? Even though my heart breaks, I’m just gonna let it ache, because staying is worse.”
As previously noted, she was not going to write the song. It’s over. What’s the point, right? Except, of course, that somehow it got written, and recorded, and is its own beautiful piece of music.
The “how” is this: “I was playing the beats that I hired someone off Fiverr to make me. I told him a bunch of different songs that I wanted, like similar beats to.” And singing to this particular beat, the first words out of her mouth were, “Why, baby why?”
“And I was like, ‘Oh, God!’ There I was, writing about what I didn’t want to write about.” Then she thought, “Fine. I’m just gonna write it.”
Thirty minutes later, she had the song, minus a bridge, at 2 minutes, 47 seconds. She was going to skip the bridge because she couldn’t think of one.
“I was just done with the song, because I didn’t even want to write it in the first place.” But then her mom told her that the song so good, it needed to be longer.
The bridge, like the song, came unbidden. One day some time later, when she was driving, “I put the song on, and the bridge came into my head.”
After 16 years of writing songs, she is expanding her career as a songwriter to include “singer.” She has eight more songs recorded and ready to release, and then no doubt more after that.
Both her releases have videos, and she wants to perform live as well.
“I’m looking into that,” she said. “Like I said, this whole thing is still very new to me, and I’m trying to figure it out.”
She lists as her influences Rihanna, Beyoncé, Demi Lovato, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Kesha, and Sia.
But, she said, “I always try to make sure that I don’t sound too similar to somebody else. There’s billions of sounds that you can use, and I want something new. So if I think, ‘Oh, God, this song sounds so much like this other person,’ I could just toss it. There’s a lot of other things I can come up with.”
To see what she comes up with, connect to Juliera on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts.
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