The following post was written by Lisa Occhino, a sixth semester piano principal from Stamford, Connecticut majoring in music business/management. She is the editor-in-chief of The Berklee Groove as well as the marketing and PR director/founding member of the Berklee A&R/Artist Development Group. Occhino won first place in the BMI Foundation’s 15th annual John Lennon Scholarship competition.
Even before I ever knew I would be going to school here, Berklee had a profound impact on my songwriting. When I began writing my first songs in middle school, I was such a perfectionist about it that I struggled to ever call a song “finished,” and would refuse to show what I had to anyone until I deemed it was truly “finished.” Naturally, no one ever heard my music, and I was stuck with a collection of dozens of unfinished songs that I didn’t know what to do with. After I had decided my freshman year of high school that Berklee was the number one (and only) college for me, I was of course dying to go to the Songwriting Workshop held over the summer.
Lisa Occhino