It’s not often that an artist with multiple Grammy nominations, recent Top Ten songs and endless superstar connections will be the opening act at Brighton Music Hall.
Tayla Parx is currently one of the most in-demand songwriters in pop and R&B, having cowritten big hits for Ariana Grande (“Thank U, Next”) and Panic! At the Disco (“High Hopes”), plus tracks by Justin Bieber, Mariah Carey, and others. She’s also made three of her own albums with a fourth now in the works, but has to push for time when she wants to go on tour. She hits Brighton Feb. 23, opening for TKay Maizda.
“My life has a crazy schedule, but the first thing I prioritize is what’s inspiring me,” she said this week. “If I’m not inspired, I can’t write the best songs for other people, so I balance out the year and say ‘This portion is for me.’ It’s always easier to solve other peoples’ problems in their music and talk about their emotional vulnerability — or at least less scary. My own music is where I get to be vulnerable, it’s a time stamp of my life and it’s the moment for me to be fearless on that stage.”
Parx was already a successful teen actress before making it as a songwriter, doing a few TV shows and the movie ‘Hairspray’. “My background in acting has given me a tool that I use when I write for someone else — I can step in and say, ‘Okay, this is not about me.’ It can definitely be like therapy — A lot of artists tell me they’ve never discussed things with anybody else. And I think there are certain psychological factors that songwriters have to think of, even something as small as saying ‘me’ or ‘we’ in a lyric. And it’s a matter of saying what makes sense for this person. One question I like to ask artists is, what do you want from this song? Do you want the song to give you closure, or do you want it to go to Number One’?”
And if they choose the latter? “I would look at the artist and say, ‘What kind of fanbase do you have, and what would be the song that would be ideal for that kind of person? And how are you going to do that uniquely enough to surpass everybody that’s in the same lane as you?’ It needs to be broad enough to be worldwide Number One, but also specific enough that it is you. And those are hard conversations to have, but I think my strength as a writer is that I can have them.”
Different artists, she says, have different needs. .For instance, she was called in to work on Janelle Monae’s breakthrough album “Dirty Computer” when it was well underway. “The label thought that someone with a different opinion, who hadn’t heard the songs before, would be great. So we ended up going in and starting fresh. I was able to lean on her and say, ‘What story are you telling here?’ I knew that she was interested in exploring the boundaries of genre and sexual fluidity, expanding the boundary of feminism. I could get behind that.”
One of her most successful collaborations was with longtime friend Ariana Grande. “She saw me in ‘Hairspray’ and we’d seen each other on various Nickelodeon sets when she was 13. So it’s good that we were friends, because that helps to make the writing process a safe space. She’s working on a project now, doing most of the writing herself, and that’s fine. If you’ve done your job as a collaborator, you’ve made the other person better.”