My full name is Serena Richelle Seymour. I am 24 years old from Leicester, living in Manchester, England. I’ve been performing ever since I was a little child, from dancing since I was 4 years old, to singing and acting since I was around 9 years old. I started at one dance school, Starlight Theatre School, moved to another dance school, Steps School Of Theatre Dance, and then moved back to Starlight at the age of 12. I have just graduated in BA (Hons) in Musical Theatre Performance at The Hammond School in Chester. During my time I have performed in lots of dance shows, competed in many competitions, gained distinctions in all my dance exams, and played lead roles in musicals such as Grace Farrell in Annie and Roxie Hart in Chicago.
When I was 11 years old, I went on holiday in England with my parents and took my guitar with me – as you casually do. One day, I put the guitar in the car as we were going on a long drive near the ocean. We then stopped and got out the car, so I picked up my guitar, put one foot up on the bonnet of the car and wrote a short song, which was only about 4 lines long and was simply about the ocean - #inspiring. Ever since then I have been mesmerised with music and writing lyrics, so I started to create more songs using my guitar, which I taught myself how to play. At the age of 12, I had already been having piano lessons for a few years, so I also started to create songs using my keyboard that I had at home. Years went on, and I found GarageBand on my iPad, an app that lets people create music. I didn’t use it very often, and when I did, it was only to mess around with instruments, however, I then upgraded my old LG phone to an iPhone, and that’s when I started to use this music app properly. Once again, time went by, and I started to create music on GarageBand using lyrics that I had been writing for a while, and then voilà, my first song was completed – an unreleased song called Puppet Master.
I continued writing lyrics and creating songs on my phone, now having completed quite a few songs which only my parents have heard so far, and then Christmas-time came around in 2016. During the holidays, I was feeling really inspired and motived to create new music that people would enjoy. I would constantly listen to the most popular and current songs in the charts, I watched videos on YouTube of producers making music in their studios, and I listened to the instrumental versions of the type of songs that I like to try and figure out how they were made, what drum beats were used, what extra and odd sound effects there are, what chord progressions, and so on. After all of this, I felt more prepared and I had a better understanding of what makes a song ‘good’, so I created two songs in the space of a few days – these songs being ‘So Bad’ and 'I Just Wanna Love You', my first ever released songs.
I booked a full day session to record a few songs at a local recording studio, Deadline Studios, for the 2nd day into 2017, wanting to kick-start my career as soon as possible. Then, after having recorded, mixed and mastered these songs, I had the idea in my head that I wanted to release each song as a single and a few weeks apart from each other. I decided that I wanted my first release to be a song that I knew at least some people would enjoy, but I also wanted it to be a song that I was proud of. So, I uploaded my song called ‘So Bad’ on Tuesday 17th January 2017 to a website called Spinnup (a distribution company who have scouts from Universal Music), for them to sell my song in stores like iTunes). I also uploaded this song to BBC Introducing, a website for unsigned artists to be able to get their music heard. A few days later, my song was on iTunes, Spotify, Deezer, Tidal, Amazon Music, Google Play and Napster, and on top of this, I woke up on the Saturday morning of the same week to a text message from the BBC saying that my song would be played on air that same night! They said it was to be played on BBC Radio Leicester, Derby and Nottingham from 8pm till 10pm as part of their BBC Introducing show with Dean Jackson. So, casually, I tuned into the radio that night at 8pm, listened to the whole show, until I heard my song be played at around 9:30pm – I couldn’t believe it, I was so happy and excited! So I took to Twitter to explain my gratitude towards Dean and his team, and to just say thank you to them. I guess it’s safe to say that I’m pretty proud of myself for achieving all of this within less than a week of releasing my first ever song, making my mark in the music scene.
As of now, I am constantly writing new lyrics, creating new songs, and releasing new music for the world to listen to and to take a few minutes out of whatever crazy, hectic or stressful lifestyle people may have to just sit back and relax. All I've ever wanted to do in life is to simply help people, to inspire them and to entertain them in whatever way shape or form. Even if I manage to make one person smile for a second then my job is done. I want to inspire and motivate people to do exactly what they love and to not feel any shame about doing so, and I am going to do this by doing exactly what I love...performing