Spear traces her lifelong passion for songwriting to an early experience of connecting with an unexpected audience. As a precocious and sensitive 14-year-old, she’d penned a ballad about a friend’s parents who had recently divorced, feeling the pain of that grown-up separation with unusual depth for a teenager, but not thinking much yet about music’s power to pull universal truths from the particulars of one person’s life. After she performed the song at a voice recital, a different adult, also recently separated, tearfully told her how much it had meant to her.
“I did not understand why she was emotional based on somebody else’s story,” Spear says now. “And then I was like, ‘Oh, this is not about me, or about the divorced parents that I know of, or about the way that I relate to their story. It’s now entirely for the people who listen to it.’ That was the greatest honor I’d ever felt. I realized I don’t ever want to do anything else.”