I have put about 5 years into working on my music, which is a relatively short time by most people’s standards. In Nashville, friends of mine have easily put in 10 to 15 years and have even relocated to follow their music. Their sacrifices are immense. Mine, in comparison, not so much. But sometimes, the lulls can leave me just as depleted – financially and emotionally.

In my short career, I have ridden both the ups and downs of the emotional rollercoaster, from being in awe with even writing on music row, to feeling the soft warmth of success within my grasp, to feeling completely empty – left cold and hopeless. When I got my first big Nashville opportunity, I felt like my life could change – I could write all the time and have new opportunities open up for me on a regular basis. I could buy the house I have been aching to live in for years and finally get the kids and me out of our old apartment. All of these things, the little could’s turned into would’s in my mind. But then reality hit. The song wouldn’t be included in the final mix. Things wouldn’t pan out like I wanted. And life would go on as usual.

I should say – music aside – that life going on as usual isn’t such a bad thing. My apartment is old and small, but it is cozy and it is home for me and my kids. There’s my mother’s beautiful art on the wall, the walls are painted turquoise, with soft orange and mustard yellow accents. And, of course, our little slice of life isn’t complete without the modern comforts of our computers and a large screen TV to snuggle up to in the evening.

Now that I am heading back to Nashville, I have mixed feelings. Part of me aches to get lost again in the songwriting, the emotion, the adrenaline, the rush. The other part of me, that knows how the “business” really works, can’t help but think, what now? What are the chances of this working out?

I know the reality. So we write a hit, that doesn’t mean it’s going to get cut. The odds of it getting cut are extremely low, but there was a time I didn’t care. It wasn’t even a gamble of my time and resources because I was convinced that once I got down to writing, nothing else would matter. All that would matter is that a new song was born that never existed before. From my own passion and creativity, I invented something. And it wouldn’t matter if no else in the world would even get to hear the song. I would still drive around Nashville and listen to it in my car over and over again, like I always do.

I think that’s why I fell in love with Nashville, because it’s a place where my need to write songs feels as natural as a person’s need to breath. Where I can pick up on songs once left behind, songs that anywhere else would just be remembered as a passing musing, and continue them with the same excitement and exhilaration I felt when the songs were first conceived.

So even though I tell myself that no one ever said that this dream would be easy, and sometimes I imagine more than what’s possible or give up more than I should, I know that despite the emotional wavering and how little I’ve “paid my dues” compared to others; at the end of the day only one single, unshakable thing matters: this is what I do. This is what I need to do. And this is what I’ll keep doing.

Love, Dayna

“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing” – Blaise Pascal, and often repeated by one of my closest friends.

Though there have been many quotes that we have shared through the years, whenever we have found ourselves in a “quandary of the heart”, this is the only one that seems to explain the unexplainable.

Thankfully I have a lot of love in my life, I’m in a great relationship now. My kids are sensitive, caring children that show responsibility and love towards each other. My mom is the shining star in my universe. I hope to be half the parent she was and still is.

Though, it’s taken a while to get here.

When my marriage ended close to a decade ago, my children were still toddlers, my ex-husband had battled and won his fight with acute leukemia, but we were left as a family of casualties. We were a young family dealing with life, death and unsurmountable stress.

They say that it’s the hard times that either make us or break us in a relationship but I don’t think it was cancer that gave our relationship that fatal push. Though it did force us to look beneath the surface, and what we both uncovered was a rock solid friendship, but not a marriage.

I know I’m not the only divorced “young woman” out there, or the only woman that needed more than just friendship in a marriage, but I am one of the lucky ones. My ex-husband, who was a friend then is still as much a friend to me now.

To end my marriage, to start a new life, it all required a gigantic leap of faith without a safety net. When I fell in love again, it was much the same, another leap of faith…

And then, there is country music, which is the perfect backdrop to a complicated life and insurmountable love. Now I’m on a path (and I think, like most things in life, it chose me instead of me choosing it) to discover what I love. And I realised that what I love is writing music.

I started writing while in the midst of my most complicated and heartbreaking years. I became quite the expert in translating what was in my heart into song. Frustrations were best left for choruses and making large statements, while verses told the story.

And now I’m telling mine.   

Love, Dayna

Faith is universal, I believe.  It comes down to believing there is something bigger than us out there. Something that knows more than we ever could, and can help us more than we can help ourselves. In fact, where would we be without faith?

I know where I wouldn’t be: in Nashville. I’m not sure how I ended up in Nashville – one of the most faith-centered towns around but I did, and it never once felt foreign to me. 

It felt right; the fact that family life is highly regarded in the South, Southern boys do talk about their

Mamas and Sundays are about church and baseball.

Not that Toronto isn’t a great town (Ha, you know Nashville has rubbed off on me when I’m calling the largest city in Canada a “town”). I love my home, but it’s a cynical place. There is a lot of that tongue-in-cheek, sarcastic humour here that you just don’t see down South. Community papers tend to lean quite far to the left and the most outlandish, miserable headline seems to win out. As Torontonians, we are mostly used to it. We are used to the constant negativity. We are used to the grunge, the sound of the subway, the ink on our fingers from the paper – but sometimes when I first return home from Nashville, I can feel the contrast like a weight, and sometimes I wonder if under the guise of being counter-culture, we are actually watering down the beauty of wholesomeness. In the effort to be subversive, have we lost sight of all the simple and beautiful things in life, even in this gritty, gritty city?

Though I am not a resident of Nashville, and only a regular visitor, I have witnessed an internal struggle within the town itself, and within country music as a whole. “Bro-country” as it is now called, is a genre of country made up of male artists; think lots of beer-trucks and girls in cut-off shorts; references which have been highly marketable and successful, especially with artists like Florida Georgia Line. There are so many crossover hits, that they often sound completely different from traditional country or even some contemporary country.

I enjoy writing about real life, and most of the writers I gravitate towards share similar values. We want to write about an experience we had, or a feeling, or the irony in life that no-one really talks about – and when that song can get you some money in return, that’s a win-win. But the goal isn’t money or profit, the goal is to write something important, something that needs to be said – even if it just embodies a feeling or a moment. A beautiful example of this is the song “Hold My Hand” by Brandy Clark and Steven Jones. The song captures the feeling of being with a new boyfriend or girlfriend, running into their ex and wishing at that moment your current lover would just take your hand. It’s a simple notion, but there’s power in something as simple as grabbing someone’s hand in support, there’s something profound in a physical gesture that so perfectly says something we all need to hear sometimes: “I’m here for you.” At the end of the day, isn’t that what faith is? The belief that there is something else out there, that when you are at your lowest, knees to the ground, hands quivering in fear or doubt, that overwhelming feeling that something or someone is there for you.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai4kVwg1kkc

I don’t think there is any way to attempt anything in the arts – particularly when trying to pursue a career in it, without a heavy dose of faith. You need faith for magical things to happen, stars need to align, timing has to work, there are many blessings involved along with trying to constantly to work on your craft. Call it luck, call it good fortune, but whatever it is, you must be truly blessed to be able to turn your sincerest dreams into a reality.   

I’ll leave you with one more thought. In my writing sessions in Nashville, when we know that we’re on the road to creating something magical, my co-writer will announce, “Let’s say a little prayer right now for this song, that it gets where it needs to go.” I hope these words, this blog, even me, get to where we need to go. I have faith that one day we all will.

Love Dayna

“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing” – Blaise Pascal, and often repeated by one of my closest friends.

Though there have been many quotes that we have shared through the years, whenever we have found ourselves in a “quandary of the heart”, this is the only one that seems to explain the unexplainable.

Thankfully I have a lot of love in my life, I’m in a great relationship now. My kids are sensitive, caring children that show responsibility and love towards each other. My mom is the shining star in my universe. I hope to be half the parent she was and still is.

Though, it’s taken a while to get here.

When my marriage ended close to a decade ago, my children were still toddlers, my ex-husband had battled and won his fight with acute leukemia, but we were left as a family of casualties. We were a young family dealing with life, death and unsurmountable stress.

They say that it’s the hard times that either make us or break us in a relationship but I don’t think it was cancer that gave our relationship that fatal push. Though it did force us to look beneath the surface, and what we both uncovered was a rock solid friendship, but not a marriage.

I know I’m not the only divorced “young woman” out there, or the only woman that needed more than just friendship in a marriage, but I am one of the lucky ones. My ex-husband, who was a friend then is still as much a friend to me now.

To end my marriage, to start a new life, it all required a gigantic leap of faith without a safety net. When I fell in love again, it was much the same, another leap of faith…

And then, there is country music, which is the perfect backdrop to a complicated life and insurmountable love. Now I’m on a path (and I think, like most things in life, it chose me instead of me choosing it) to discover what I love. And I realised that what I love is writing music.

I started writing while in the midst of my most complicated and heartbreaking years. I became quite the expert in translating what was in my heart into song. Frustrations were best left for choruses and making large statements, while verses told the story.

And now I’m telling mine.   

Love, Dayna

Everyone has a story, I'm not the only one.

I've long been inspired by other women's stories. My grandmother was a great storyteller. She also provided an excellent example of “the long version of things”, which is a nice way of saying she had a hard time shortening things down – a trait which I have undoubtedly inherited (if you don’t think so, you may see it very soon). She also repeated her stories and could never remember if she had said it before (which she had… several times), but it didn't matter, she always told it like it was the first time. And to me, each story gave me something new that I might as well have been hearing it for the first time, too.

What I loved most about her stories, and probably why I tolerated hearing them all the time as a kid, was the simple fact that her stories always had a message, and usually a message that made you feel better in some way. There’s one (of many) that still strikes a chord, about her first cousin, the only family member left in Europe during the war. His wife and children were all killed by the Nazis and when he finally came to Canada, he was 40, struggling, and a broken man. As my grandmother would explain, “Because G-d works in mysterious ways,” he met a woman who was already in her ’40s and, at the time, deemed too old of a maid to find an eligible suitor. They fell in love, they married, they had children and they led a beautiful life together. From a life of pain, they were able to make a life more blessed than either of them could’ve imagined. Who wouldn’t feel better after a story like that?

My grandmother told me that every pot had its lid, and with every door that closed, there will soon be another door that opens for you. That's what stories have always meant to me. That’s what I’m hoping my story will be.

Through the years, I gravitated towards memoirs by women, stories like Eat, Pray, Love and Wild, that proved that sometimes it takes a dark tunnel to see some light. Other times it takes an actual physical journey. In my case it took Nashville and country music, to find a place for my own story.

I'm not the only one; music for centuries has been built on narrative and emotion. Songwriters that got their start after a failed relationship, locked themselves in a bedroom and came out with an album. There are many. The Bluebird; the renowned songwriter venue in Nashville, responsible for discovering some of country's greatest writers, and for which the new primetime ABC show Nashville takes place, draws new writers every Monday night. The line-up has been known to go around the block and the wait is hours long. Writers get a chance to play a single song for a group of eager listeners, and although some are looking for their big break, others are looking for catharsis, and are willing to travel across the country to get it. I did.

I'm not the only one to feel completed stumped by life and love in my mid ’30s, unsure of my direction, and in a constant tug of war between my hopes and facing reality.

In songwriting sessions, you share the burden of your story. It doesn't matter if you are 17 or 70, everyone is going through something. I have a co-writer, and now a dear friend, who is well into his 70's. In his songs, he often shares updates on his relationship: “So-and-so spends so much time with her grandchildren that it leaves for very little bonding time,” he sings. On weekends he’s often left feeling like the odd man out – there’s a song about that, too.

There are stories everywhere, and where there’s a story, there are words that can dance on a melody and transform it into a song. Thank you for reading this blog and joining me as I share mine.

Tell me yours.

Love, Dayna

This is 40.

I love that movie – Leslie Mann makes turning 40 feel so much better!

My mid-life crisis started five years earlier than it should have and it involved a guitar and newfound love of Mexican food, which Nashville does so well. Of course, this was before the fish taco craze hit Toronto.

Speaking of the place with good-but-not-as-good-as-Nashville Mexican food, I was born in Toronto, at Mount Sinai Hospital. It was quite an uneventful birth, but not an uneventful life. I’ve had ups, and downs, and even lowers, but I’ve managed to survive – maybe even thrive.

In good times and bad, I’ve always been “sensitive”, which as a child meant lots of stomach aches, my mom picking me up from the nurse’s office every week, and a serious case of mono at age 14 which left me hospitalized and out of school for months. The doctors attributed my condition to mostly stress, but I knew otherwise. It wasn’t stress, it was the emotional turmoil of my first love: George Cross. He was the one…for three weeks.

Since then, I’ve been married and I have two great kids that are now almost teens (oh, G-d…). My marriage ended, and I fell in love again. It was complicated, it was confusing, and often times it was heartbreaking but it was “a love as true as mine” to quote George Strait.

But in my mid-30s all of that miraculously translated into music and lyrics – Taylor Swift was on to something with all her ballads about her ex-lovers: this whole putting-your-feelings-into-song thing is really helpful. Though song writing didn’t change the past, it did give me somewhere to channel all the pain instead of keeping it bottled up inside of me. Truth is, I didn’t fall in love with just song writing, I fell in love with country, and I fell in love with Nashville.

To be honest, Nashville saved me.

In Nashville, I found a part of myself that I had lost… or never even had. I found a place where doing what I love, song writing, just felt right… but more on that later.

I do really like the South, oddly enough. Okay, I LOVE the food in the South, but I actually feel really comfortable in the Bible Belt of all places. I don’t know, maybe there’s something about being surrounded by people who have faith that is so comforting. Maybe faith isn’t about the Bible at all, but hoping that one day you can heal from all the pain you’ve experienced…

Not that I know too much about the Bible to begin with. I should add that I’m Jewish, which hasn’t exactly helped me in country music, then again, neither has living in the Little Israel of Toronto, Canada. I grew up the intersection of Bathurst and Lawrence, surrounded by bagel shops and lox mongers. Clearly, I haven’t been on too many dusty back roads, which sometimes means I have trouble with the basic vernacular of country music. Exhibit A: “90 proof”- I didn’t know what that meant but it sounded cool (which in Nashville is pronounced coo – silent L, quick).

Before Nashville, I had never played an instrument or written any poetry, but I did have a few big blips in my adult life and that might be why I had so much to write about and why I needed to let my words out somehow.

So now, here’s the Nashville Diaries, another outlet just like songs, to share some of my thoughts on song writing, on L-O-V-E love, on following dreams you didn’t know you had, letting go of dreams you shouldn’t have had, and also sharing some of the aching lulls that come with any kind of creative work….but more about that in a future blog. For now all I will say is this: somehow, and I’m still not sure how, I found something in Nashville. I hope this blog can help you find something, too.

Love, Dayna

Songwriter and musician, Dayna Shereck, has just released her new EP Suitcase Full of Dreams and has a song featured in the upcoming family flick, On the Wing. Previously, Dayna has co-written songs with Marcum Stewart on his album "Put It In Drive" and Canadian country artist Barbara Lynn Doran for her upcoming album. She has also been placed on the Nashville Songwriter’s Association “Ones to Watch” list and was a finalist in the “Great American Song Contest” and a semifinalist in the “International Songwriting Competition” for 2012, 2013 and 2014.

Dayna will be returning to Nashville in October for more song writing and to find that inexplicable something we’ve all been looking for.