Becky Crosby decided at the ripe old age of 10 years old that she wanted to pursue a professional career in music.

It started with piano lessons, grew into writing her own songs, and eventually brought her to studying at both a performing arts high school and college. She’s dipped her toes into contemporary music, classical voice, and is currently in her last year of studying jazz.

“With every different genre I've learned or trained in, I just bring more of that into my songwriting,” she said.

Much of her current songwriting will be reflected in her upcoming EP, Laugh It Off. While many of the songs were first written in 2018, her newest single, “Can We Pretend”, was written at the beginning of 2020. She calls the single an “unrequited love song with a jazz flair” and shares that the other tracks reflect on personal experiences from the last few years.

Despite some of these tracks being written almost three years ago, her songwriting process usually brings her back to the arsenal of songs she’s been holding onto.

“I'll write a song or half a song and I'll keep it somewhere and I won't touch it for a while until I have that idea again,” she said. “I’ll bring it to my band or the people I'm working with at the time and we’ll talk about it, and that usually revamps it in my head too because it just feels like something different that I can work on and just adding to it to make it better for release.”

Her band typically consists of the same people, most of them fellow jazz majors that she’s been studying with for the last four years.

“We’re able to write really well [together], and even though pop or pop funk isn't always their thing, they get it and they know what I'm looking for usually when we’re playing live,” she said.

She has come a long way since her freshman year of college, where she remembers adjusting from a strict classical environment to breaking all the rules in jazz. It was a rough adjustment period, but it helped her realize that incorporating all elements of her background was what made her stand out.

“I'm going to do my best; I'm going to work on my own music and I'm going to perform the best that I can with my own flair and style,” she said. “I think that's probably one of my most rewarding life things in college - just realizing that I can do these different genres with my own spin on it.”

Becky Crosby has so much to look forward to in the next year: releasing her EP, graduating college and discovering what she wants to do next. She isn’t bound by genres, but instead free to create as her heart desires.