Vanessa Thompson won’t sing you the first song she ever composed.
Granted, it’s a bit old. The 22-year-old wrote it when she was 8.
“I never sang it to anybody,” she said. “I don’t really have a name for it. Top secret.”
While the Marysville singer might keep that song under wraps, she intends on going public with her newer material. On Thursday, she plans to perform at the Baltic Room in Seattle to celebrate her independently released album, “Vanessa.”
Thompson may be a familiar face to some in the area. Along with graduating from Marysville-Pilchuck High School, she has performed at county fairs and a Seattle SuperSonics game. In March, she sang the national anthem at the Everett Silvertips game.
While she usually doesn’t get edgy before performing, singing the anthem made her a little nervous.
“That’s like the last song you want to mess up,” she said.
Thompson has wanted to get into the entertainment business for years. Originally, she was drawn to acting, but her vocal abilities pulled her into music.
“I always got voted most likely to be famous, most likely to be on ‘American Idol,’” she said.
And indeed, she tried out for “American Idol” during its first season, eventually being told by the famous judges that, at 16, she wasn’t mature enough to be on the program. Still, she called it a positive experience, taking the judges’ words of encouragement to heart.
“They had really good things to say to me,” she said. “Simon was really nice.”
Now, she writes most of her own material — R&B-influenced pop songs such as “Baby This Love” and “Never Gonna Let You Go.” Sometimes, her father helps with lyrics; he penned “Where the Angels Fly.”
For that track, Vanessa handed her dad a notebook during a family trip and asked him to write a song.
“We were like 35,000 feet in the air on an airplane going to one of her sister’s volleyball tournaments,” Jim Thompson said. “That’s the inspiration for it.”
Clearly a proud parent, Thompson refers to his daughter’s musical skill as her genius, and is quick to brush aside any credit for material he co-wrote.
“She’s the one that breathes life into it, gives it color and really makes it something,” he said.
Some must agree. The songs on her MySpace page have been played a combined 100,000 times. Numbers like that help assure her she’s doing the right thing in passing over record companies to release material through Butterfly Music Productions, a family business.
“I think there’s a lot of people that can go out and get signed to a major label and do it that way, but … I really feel like I’m making my own path,” she said.
Still, she’s not overly concerned with where that path leads — as long as she reaches some listeners on it.
“I want people to enjoy the music, and feel they can relate to me, and feel they can connect with me as an artist,” she said.
Reporter Andy Rathbun: 425-339-3455 or e-mail arathbun@heraldnet.com
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