Music, Soul & Stories from Simone Song
Building a setlist isn't just about what you decide to play — it's about what you quietly decide to bury. The omissions tell a story just as loud as the songs that make the cut, and learning to read that story changed how I think about performing altogether.
For a long time, I thought silence on stage was a problem to solve. Turns out, it was the most honest thing I could offer. Here's how learning to let a room breathe completely changed the way I perform.
There's a specific kind of dread that hits when your own name becomes the thing people are coming to see. For a long time, I couldn't figure out why success felt so much like exposure. This is the essay I wish someone had handed me the night I first headlined under my own name.
A setlist isn't just a running order—it's a portrait of who you are right now, whether you meant it to be or not. But what happens when the songs your audience loves most are the ones you've quietly moved past? That tension is real, and it's worth sitting with.
For a long time, I measured a song's worth by how many people clicked play. Then one quiet night after a show, a stranger told me something that made me rethink every number on my dashboard. This is the story of how I learned to stop letting metrics be the final word on what my music means.
The songs you perform right now aren't just a playlist—they're a mirror. Reading your current rotation backward through time can surface patterns about your evolution you never consciously chose, and point toward where you're actually headed next.
For years I shaped my songs around a clock I didn't even own. Once I stopped writing for the skip button, something unexpected happened — the music actually started to mean something.
There's something quietly revelatory about learning a song that someone else wrote from the inside out. Covering other artists' music has been one of the most disorienting—and ultimately clarifying—experiences of my creative life. It's not really about the song you're covering. It's about what the process forces you to admit about yourself.
There's a very specific moment in the writing process where something shifts — where the song stops being a craft project and starts feeling dangerously close to the truth. Learning to recognize that moment, and then deciding what to do with it, has been one of the hardest and most honest parts of being a songwriter.
For a solid stretch of my career, I measured almost everything by what the dashboard said. Plays, saves, playlist adds — I watched all of it obsessively, and it quietly started reshaping how I wrote and what I released. It took a few humbling realizations to understand that the numbers were never going to tell me what I actually needed to know.
Every artist knows the moment — someone in the crowd shouts out a song you haven't touched in years, and suddenly the room holds its breath waiting to see what you'll do. Saying no to a fan request is one of the most uncomfortable things I do on stage, but I've learned it might also be one of the most important. Here's why I stopped letting nostalgia run my setlist.
Some of my most honest songs came from rooms full of people I barely knew. Letting go of creative control felt terrifying—until it didn't. Here's what happened when I started saying yes to the unfamiliar.
There are songs in my catalog I've performed hundreds of times that no longer feel like mine. Retiring them from the setlist was one of the most complicated decisions I've made as an artist—and one of the most freeing. This is what that actually looked like.
Ask someone their favorite song and they'll give you one answer. Check their Spotify Wrapped and you'll often find something completely different. That gap between the music we declare and the music we return to is one of the most fascinating things about being a listener—and one of the most humbling things about being an artist. Here's what the science and the personal experience actually say.
Being a solo artist sounds like total freedom—and it is, until you realize freedom can feel a lot like being the only person at your own party. This is an honest look at what it actually takes to build something real when you're the whole operation. The loneliness is real, but so is the connection.
Social media, livestreams, and Discord servers have collapsed the distance between artists and fans in ways that feel genuinely wonderful—until they don't. Here's my honest attempt to untangle what it means to build real community while navigating the strange intimacy of being known by people you've never met.
There's a particular kind of humbling that comes with being the opening act—walking out to a venue that's barely a third full, watching people order drinks instead of looking at the stage. But those early sets taught me more about performing than any sold-out show ever could.
I never planned to let a recommendation engine influence my songwriting. Then I started paying attention to how people actually find music, and everything got more complicated. This is my honest reckoning with algorithms, authenticity, and what it means to write for real humans in a world run by data.
Putting together a live show sounds simple until you're staring at a decade's worth of songs and realizing you barely recognize the person who wrote half of them. Here's how I turned that chaos into something that actually moves people. Turns out, the setlist is the most honest thing about a concert.
Forget the romanticized image of a songwriter at a grand piano with a perfectly lit candle. Simone Song pulls back the curtain on the quirky, counterintuitive rituals that actually fuel her creative process — and shares why breaking the "rules" might be exactly what your music needs.