GAYLE reveals the pop hit that convinced her, at age eight, that *she* could write songs tooGAYLE reveals the pop hit that convinced her, at age eight, that *she* could write songs too

At the tender age of 17, GAYLE already has a global hit with “abcdefu.”  But she’s actually an old hand at this music thing: She wrote her first song at the age of eight — even though now, looking back, she’s not sure how she became convinced that she could even do that.

“I don’t know why I listened to music, and, like, specifically songs and thought, ‘I could do that!'” she laughs. “I don’t know what cocky son of a hmm-hmm I was, at like eight, to be like, ‘Seems easy enough! Let me try to do that!'”

“I’m really glad my insecurities kicked in at some point or else I’d be a cocky son of a…!” she laughs.

However, GAYLE knows exactly which song it was that started her thinking about writing something herself: It was “We Found Love,” Rihanna and Calvin Harris’ monster hit from 2011.

“That song got stuck in my head, and I kept writing down the lyrics to it, like, ‘a hopeless place’ — what do you mean, ‘a hopeless place?'” she recalls. “And I just started like breaking down lyrics in my head, and I remember, realizing that people had to, like, come up with it. Like, somebody had to make it, for it to go on the radio.”

She laughs, “And then it took me a second to realize, like, the first song you write is not a hit. I thought, like, I’d be like spitting out number ones by like, nine! I was like, ‘I got this!’ Nah, it took me a second to learn that one!”

But it seem like GAYLE was always pretty precocious: She was performing live in bars at the age of 11.  But starting March 9, she’ll be playing actual concert venues, as she kicks off her first headlining tour.