Katie Drake says she’s always had a song in her heart. Early videos show the youngster singing for her family and friends. The California native was soon singing in church and by the time she was nine she was leading the music part of the worship service. Singing in church was natural for Katie, whose first recorded musical experiences were children’s records. “My folks thought it was important for children to listen to music on their level, so the first songs I heard were Bible stories and scriptures set to music,” Katie remembers. As she grew older Christian artists like Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith became part of her musical repertoire along with musicals like “The Sound of Music.” “I loved those melody driven songs, something you can easily sing along with,” Katie explains. “As I got older, in junior high and high school, I started listening to country music and fell in love with the story songs that I heard on country radio. Today some of my favorite singers are Keith Urban, Brad Paisley, Martina McBride and Christian singer Chris Tomlin.” Although many of Katie’s favorite singers are also songwriters, the 26-year old Drake didn’t start writing songs until a few years ago. “I didn’t feel like I had enough to say,” she explains. “I hadn’t had any emotional trauma or heartache which is what I thought most songwriters wrote from.” All of that changed after Katie attended her cousin’s wedding and heard a song she had written for her husband. “I came away wanting to do that, wanting to write a song for my own wedding,” Drake says. “When I sat down to write it just flowed out of me and I wrote “Bless This Man” in a couple of hours. It was exciting for me to create the song and I had so much fun doing it. I challenged myself to write another one so I wrote a song for my dad.” Katie continue to write as specific experiences happened in her life -- a friend’s sister died in an auto accident, her husband’s grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer. In 2006 Katie decided she needed to write songs with the goal of recording them for an album project. She began looking at all of her life experiences, not just the traumatic ones, and found that she could apply other things in her life to songs. In December 2006 she visited her sister Stacy in New York City. While there she got with musician Sean Towe and they wrote what she considers to be her first major commercial song, “In Your Shoes.” Interestingly, the song came out of her experiences of working with horses at her uncle Pat Parelli’s Natural Horsemanship facility in Colorado. “There are a lot of things the teach there about horses that correspond to relationships with people,” Katie says. “I wanted to write a song about understanding perspectives. We worked on it and then we put it down with just me and a guitar. Then Sean took it and added other instruments to the tracks. When he sent it to me it was really the first time that I heard one of my songs come to life like that. It’s also the first song I had written that I felt was generic enough for other people to identify with.” That one song turned into an EP of her original material. Katie says people have given her great feedback on her music. “This summer a woman came up to me and said she had heard one of my songs the day before and it had helped her understand some changes she needed to make in her relationship with her husband. The next day she came back with her husband with her and they told me they were encouraged by my songs and planned to work on their marriage together.” Katie says instances such as this one are what motivates her to write. She remembers times in her own life when music motivated or consoled her, and reinforced what she was going through in her life. “I get a lot of personal satisfaction out of singing and being creative. But my real motivation is in the thought that if God can use my music to touch and bless people, then he has given me this gift for a reason. Music is powerful and if God can use my music than I want to be able to apply that gift in the way he wants me to.” -30- Contact Katie Drake 530-966-1309 katie@katiedrakesongs.com www.katiedrakesongs.com