Toronto-based guitarist, songwriter, vocalist and koto player Jessica Stuart (aka JESSA) has made a music career writing and performing harmonically adventurous, and devastatingly honest indie-jazz-rock tunes around the world. Stuart is also a rare professional female guitarist, with dozens of side-player credits ranging from Mirvish Productions’ SIX to Classic Albums Live to Idioteque, and loves to put her chops in the spotlight when playing her unique, musically playful original songs as the Jessica Stuart Trio.

When not on festival stages, you’ll find Jessica producing albums for other artists in studio, on international and local airwaves, with a Japanese Top 40 single, 5 songs in the Canadian Songwriting Competition finals and as the subject and composer of CBC’s most viewed documentary of all time, Finding Fukueh, with over 15 million views.

Jessica shared her song Price of my Love. Download the lyrics to follow along.

We talked about:

• Our songwriting challenge for 2025 to write a song in an odd time signature
• Did John Lennon INTENTIONALLY Sabotage The Beatles With His Bass Playing?
• The difference between a refrain and a chorus
• How when listeners hear explicit imagery in your songs, their brains light up in the same way as they do with their own memories
• How you can write songs faster when you have more songwriting experience
• How early ideas might not make it into your song (and that’s OK), but they can be used as starting points for other songs
• Collaborating with your former self as a songwriting challenge