 Backroads is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. I'm Jennifer Johnson. I am originally from Bemidji, Minnesota. I graduated from Bemidji High School in 2009 and graduated from Concordia College in 2013. And now I am a music teacher in Aiken, Minnesota. As a musician, I would describe myself as Christian by nature, but I write about anything and everything, whether that's growing up or trying to find my place in the world or just something that happened the other day with a conversation with a friend. It's my way of kind of expressing my emotions and where I'm at in this life. And describe a little bit about your songwriting process. Does a tune come to your mind or is it lyrics first? How do you approach writing a song? It can kind of depend on which one comes first. Sometimes it can be a melody. I'll be sitting and picking on my guitar and find out a cool pattern. I kind of like and I can hear melody in my head. Sometimes it's some words that I just can't get out of my head, whether they're lyrics or idea or a topic. And sometimes you just wake up in the middle of the night and you have an idea and you have to write it down or record it so that you don't forget it. It definitely varies upon by song to song, I guess. Some of them happen really fast and some of them take a long time. High school. I was in a show choir and I was kind of a goofball and I would sit down at the piano and just like make up songs when people would walk over. I met a really good friend of mine who had started kind of dabbling and writing and I was like, I'll be kind of fun to write something like serious and actually start performing those kinds of things. So throughout college I started to just kind of dabble in it as I went. I performed a lot in like open mics and different variety shows and things like that on campus. But I never performed my own music until I moved to Aiken when I started teaching. What's it like for you as a performer to be in front of an audience? It's a really vulnerable thing to do. It can be nerve-wracking at first, but what's really cool about it is that you get to communicate your story and somehow that can relate to somebody else. And if music that I play can make somebody smile or if it's something they can relate to, it's really cool to see that reaction. And being able to share that when I was in choir in college, one of the things I talked about was completing the circle of communication where we can be singing in a room by ourselves or I can be sitting in my apartment playing my guitar, but it really comes together when you complete the circle and you have those other people to share the music with because that's the other half of it, that's where you get to communicate it and where they get to be involved in the process too. So I think what's cool about it for me is being able to share that experience with other people and kind of communicate in a really cool way. Aspiring musician, that it's important to remember that it's something that comes from within you. You can't really mess it up if that makes sense. A song that you write or whatever it is that you're feeling that you're expressing, I always try to tell my students that there's really nothing that you can do wrong when you're making up your own music. Backroads is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people November 4th, 2008.