With one leg slung over her acoustic guitar and her notebook opened in front of her, 15-year-old Samantha Cesmat perches on the edge of an overstuffed chair, ready to compose. Here in her family’s Snoqualmie garage, surrounded by photos of Paris, hand-drawn art, and the drumset that her brother sometimes plays while she’s writing, is her favorite place to work.
When inspiration visits, though, she could write a song anywhere.
“Sometimes I write about music itself, what it means to me,” Samantha said. “A lot about friendship. I write a lot about love, too, and my walk with Jesus, my faith.”
What’s more, what she writes, both music and lyrics, is good. That’s not just according to her parents, Walt and Jolene. The family got the professional opinion of recording artists Brian Ferrell and Timothy James Meaney earlier this year when Samantha, then only 14, went to Wiseman Studios in Bellevue, to record a single, for upload to iTunes.
Walt had arranged the studio session simply to get his daughter some exposure to the studio environment, he said, but that plan quickly changed.
Samantha had come prepared to perform one of three songs, she remembered, and “They stopped me in the middle of one, the first one that we recorded—I wasn’t even finished, and they were like ‘This is an amazing song! This is the first one. We need to record this.’”
That song, “Wonderland” was completely done, recorded, and edited within that single session. “And at the end of that day, they realized ‘hey, we’d really like to work with you,’” Walt recalled. After one day, Samantha really wanted to work with them, too. They spoke her language, she said. Not only were they creative with making her work sound beautiful, they were also experts in Samantha’s real love.
“I never want to put music down,” she said. “I couldn’t even explain to you my love of music, it’s so big… I just love music so much.”
Her parents can tell countless stories about Sam and her music.
“I sang to her every night until she was 4,” said Jolene. “I would sing until she went to sleep.”
Samantha says she has been “singing ever since I can remember,” and playing the guitar since she was 9 years old. She started playing the piano, to her parents’ surprise, at a very young age, after seeing the movie “Beethoven.” Jolene remembered waking up the next morning to the sound of the movie music, which was coming from the piano, not the television.
Walt remembers the first time he heard his oldest daughter sing, which was only a few years ago, but he doesn’t remember when she first started writing songs. He does know it was only about a year ago, though.
“She’d come in from the garage and say, ‘I just wrote a song!’” he said.
Ten of those songs are on “Perfect Time,” the CD that Samantha produced in two weeks last August. The family is celebrating the production of the CDs with a release party and concert Saturday, Nov. 19, starting at 7 p.m. in the Calvary Chapel, 1556 Boalch Ave. N.W.
