By Victoria Stone-Meadows
A TALENTED music student from Nossal High School in Berwick has won second prize in a national song writing contest and will have her song released on a compilation CD.
Jade Roman, 15, has been taking music composition classes at school but has grown up in a music household that nurtured her love of song.
“I really like music and my family is quite musical,” she said.
“Both my parents sing and my mum is a pianist, guitarist and violinist and I have been playing piano since a young age.”
Jade, who is in Year 9, has written some music before but never written a song with accompanying lyrics. “I have made compositions but never with words and since I started at Nossal this year, the lessons have given me an opportunity to formalize my performance and improve.”
See Jade perform Bulletproof.
Jade found out about the Change the World with Your Song competition and wrote her song Bulletproof just two days before the competition ended.
The competition offers entrants a choice of four categories to write their songs in the theme of and Ms Jade chose to write about hard done by war veterans under the social justice theme.
“I looked at the themes on offer and saw social justice and it really appealed to me,” she said.
“At first I had no idea what I was going to do but recent issues like homelessness among war veterans once they come back and are left with nothing was an interesting topic to talk about.”
It was only though a stroke of luck that Jade could upload her song in time to enter the competition.
“I had two days to upload it and I had written and finalized and record it,” she said.
“I ignored my other homework because I had to put it in that next day and even though I thought it could be better I just submitted it.
“When I went to upload, it was taking hours and I was stressing out but I got notified that the website had crashed and date had been moved two days forward so I got a chance to do harmonies as well.”
One of the prizes for coming second in the Secondary School category of the song contest on 4 October means Jade will have her song professionally recorded by Phoenix Sound Studios of Hurstbridge.
Her song will then appear as part of a collaborative CD with other well-known Australian artists such as Kutcha Edwards, winner of the 2016 Melbourne Prize, and Nicky Bomba, winner of the Best World Music Aria Award in 2016.
