Thornton music student Tippy Balady takes songwriting as a challenge

Not many singer-songwriters working today can say they’ve turned down “American Idol,” and even fewer can say they’ve turned the show down more than once.

For Tippy Balady, though, the decision to turn down such an opportunity was easy. As a high school senior in Dallas she auditioned for both “Idol” and USC’s Thornton School of Music. But she chose to attend school rather than pursue a television career.

“Behind the scenes of ‘American Idol,’ they have a lot of people that go out and vet artists,” the singer-songwriter recounts over a soda at a campus cafe. “A lot of the people that you see on TV are people that they found on Instagram … and asked, ‘Hey, do you want to skip the cattle call?’”

Balady by no means is simply “someone on Instagram,” though. Beginning her music career at age 15, after a long, difficult stint as a competitive figure skater (with some songwriting classes on the side for fun), she began to take her craft more seriously after producing her first song for charity with the help of her parents.

That first song, “Coconut Cake,” produced for a Parkinson’s Foundation event, was about her grandmother. Though she notes it wasn’t fantastic production-wise, as she was just getting her feet wet for the first time in releasing music, and her parents didn’t have much experience in music when the song was released, it led to having an opportunity to work with more experienced producers as only a senior in high school.

Straight after the song’s release, she was approached by Jason Burt, a producer out of Modern Electric Studio in Dallas. Burt — just as her parents, her producer for “Coconut Cake,” and later on the American Idol scouts, as well as the Thornton School of Music would — saw something unique in her songwriting and style. Shortly after, her next release, “Begin Again,” marked a more formal start to her career.

The song — a slow, powerful anthem-like piece — also marked the beginning of her journey to finding and developing her sound. She’s always had a distinct, twee-like style that pervades both her music and physical presence. Drawing heavily from childlike, whimsical imagery and focusing on themes such as coming of age, a sense of whimsy is ever-present in her work. Balady’s most recent music video release, “Alphabet Soup,” uses imagery of her and some friends dressed up as clowns, romping around the town in Texas where her grandparents live as they videotape each other on an ancient camcorder.

The musician leaves a strong sense of this whimsy wherever she goes. Even on a chilly Friday morning off from school, she rolled into the coffee shop on a pair of yellow roller skates and picked out one of the more unique drink options — a ginger soda.

Given the qualities present in her music, Balady’s influences include artists such as Dodie, a British singer-songwriter with a playful style similar to Balady’s, and the Punch Brothers, a bluegrass-inspired band that likes to play with genre. She also cites Sarah Bareilles as an artist whose songwriting she wanted to emulate. However, Balady credits her time studying gospel music in Black churches back home as the place where she learned the most about singing.

Balady almost treats songwriting as a game. From the time she was in songwriting camp as a kid (with a boot on each foot from figure skating injuries) to now, she draws inspiration not just from her life experiences, but from the suggestions her friends and professors give her. Oftentimes, she’ll write from prompts, but it could never be as simple as “write about an experience you had.” Of course, her sense of play has to be present even here.

“Case in point, last week, I went to a writing session that was like, ‘I want you to write about a crow,’” Balady says. “Then it was like, ‘What do you mean you want me to write about a crow?’ And then, I just kind of — I dunno — unfolded it from there.”

And did anything come of this tale of a crow?

“[I wrote a song about] being summoned by this being to come closer and come nearer to it. And it turns out, it’s more about an unhealthy relationship, the darkness of the wings,” she said.

Jumping into her more current projects, Balady remembers something she wanted to say about her influences.

“I forgot to mention one thing: I’m also very influenced by musicals. Sondheim is a huge influence,” she says.

In addition to admiring Sarah Bareilles’ traditional songwriting, Balady had seen her Broadway show, Waitress, and was also inspired by her musical theater writing. So much so that Balady is hoping, with the help of some people in the school of Cinematic Arts, to write and produce her own musical.

Not just any premise, either — Balady wants to write an ‘80s slasher musical.

After seeing Waitress, Balady says, “I [didn’t] even know that that was an option for me. It didn’t even pop into my head. And so since then, I’ve been like, ‘How can I do this?’”

Balady acknowledges as only a college student working on her own, and as someone with not a lot of education in composing or musical theater structure, she may not have the means right now to make a musical come to fruition. Even so, it seems that she’s accepted her lack of understanding of the genre and taken it as a challenge — and the thrill she might get from learning how to do it well might be euphoric.

“[Having the means and] being able to actually do the form and then me being able to make the music on top of that — which, out of everything, that’s what I’m the most interested in anyway — that is the most freeing and liberating experience,” Balady says.

One project of hers that is much closer to releasing, though, is titled “Taming of a Wendy Bird.” Aptly for Balady, it takes themes (and its name) from Peter Pan and explores the “growing pains” and mundanity of life.

“It’s all about the growing pains that we experience in our lives and the little things that we have to deal with … that are more nuanced and people just don’t necessarily talk about,” she says. “Like, I have this song called ‘Quite Frankly,’ and it’s about not being able to get rid of images of old friends on your walls … You have some sort of connection to it, but you know that you should throw it away.”

Of course, for the music video she has planned for the song’s release, Balady wants everyone to dress as pirates.

“For me, it’s just like, This is your life. This is me in a nutshell. This is my little core of songwriting and it encapsulates a very important and imperative moment in my life.”