JagBytes

Issue date: 4/16/08 Section: Entertainment

Media Credit: Courtesy of Deanna Wrigley IUPUI student and singer-songwriter Deanna Wrigley.

IUPUI student Deanna Wrigley has a special talent, which she is starting to share with her friends and as many people as she can. In addition to attending school full time and working as a babysitter and house cleaner, Wrigley somehow makes time for singing and songwriting.

Wrigley is a 22-year-old junior at IUPUI, where she studying to be a social worker. She has recently started singing songs she has written herself. Wrigley's dedication to playing guitar has been shown with her eight years of practice.

"I got a guitar for Christmas in 1999," Wrigley says. "I taught myself how to play guitar in 2000 when I was in ninth grade and have been playing ever since. I also took guitar lessons for a semester from Jamey Faulkner, who used to teach private guitar through IUPUI."

Wrigley loves to write, and all her songs are original. Songwriting is a recent hobby for her.

"I didn't start progressively writing songs until very recently, sometime during fall 2007," Wrigley says. "I have been journaling since third grade, so I have always been a writer."

Her songs tell stories inspired by people and events in her life.

"Most of my songs are story songs," Wrigley says. "They are stories about weird conversations I have with people, stories about something I see or stories about my relationships. Every song is based around a person or people. So obviously, the people that are in my songs have a high influence on my music."

Wrigley describes her style of music as "raw, personal, honest, faith-based, and folk." She explains by saying, "I prefer 'faith-based' rather than Christian, because Christians are people, so how can a song technically be 'Christian'? I think 'folk' is fitting because my songs are story songs."

Wrigley says that other bands help inspire her music as well.

"Kaki King is a female acoustic guitar player who started off as a drummer," she says. "She likes to tap on her guitar, so I have adopted that into my music."

Wrigley also incorporates piano into some of her songs. At a recent live-performance at a small coffee shop in Fishers, she broke out the keyboard in her own rendition of the popular radio hit, "Love Song," by Sara Bareilles. Wrigley also plays the violin and cello but sticks mainly to guitar and some keyboards for her songwriting.

Wrigley says that she plans to put her career first and continue exploring her music mostly for pleasure.

"Music is a hobby for me," she says. "I plan on being a social worker, so I want to 'keep my day job', but do music on the weekends. I like the idea of singing for a cause, so once I have the resources, I will mix my weekday job with my weekend hobby."

Asked to choose a lyric from one of her songs to describe her best, Wrigley already knew the answer.

"I put my favorite color, orange, in my song, 'Blinded,' and I am obsessed with the color orange to the point of painting my room orange," she says. "So of all my lyrics, the line 'the clouds are orange' describes me the most."

Wrigley maintains a MySpace page for her music where she keeps a blog about her songwriting and has posted six of her songs for people to listen to. Her page can be found at http://www.myspace.com/dejosmusic

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools