How an Oakland songwriter transformed her own burnout into a creative app for other artists

San Francisco Chronicle​

12 hours ago

For most of Rachel Efron's musical life composing was an intensely isolating experience.
'I'd lock myself away to write a song like I had the flu,' the Oakland singer and songwriter told the Chronicle. 'Each song was like a fever dream and it was about getting something really right that was inside me. Collaborating couldn't exist in the same universe.'
Then in March 2020, as the COVID-19 outbreak prompted a global shutdown, Efron's world opened up. She received an out-of-the-blue phone call from Grammy Award-winning producer and composer Narada Michael Walden that set her on a collaborative path that continues to this day.
Now, in much the same way Walden expanded her compositional horizons, she's created an app intended to amplify artistic endeavors.
Efron launched the interactive app Muzi Creativity in January with a goal to buoy musicians, artists and others in creative fields. Designed to counteract burnout and help people navigate around mental blocks, Muzi engages with participants via an introductory quiz followed by weekly prompts, mission suggestions, reflections and tailored meditations.
With more than six months of data and feedback from hundreds of subscribers around the world, Efron recently released an updated version of Muzi that leans into subscribers' fascination with the music-making process.
'Interviews with our first users taught me what I often learn when I'm creating things: Be simple! Be direct!' she said. 'In the first iteration of the app I was over-explaining everything. Now the UI is more self-explanatory. And since I'm not saying, 'First do this, now go here and do this,' I get to center the content that actually matters.'
Efron was already an award-winning singer-songwriter who'd spent the past few years focusing on producing other artists when Walden reached out to her. The collaboration surfaced publicly in 2022 with 'Together We Run,' the opening track on ' Freedom,' Journey's first new studio album in more than a decade.
'He opened this whole door inside of me, writing for other artists,' Efron said of Walden. 'All of this was alchemizing in me, and it's come out in believing I have something to offer other artists.'
Though Walden toured with Journey for a few years, taking over the drum chair from Steve Smith in 2020, he is usually the man behind the curtain, ensconced in his recording studio. Over the decades he's written and produced tracks on albums by several dozen era-defining artists, including Aretha Franklin, Regina Belle, Patti LaBelle, Mariah Carey, Diana Ross and Lisa Fischer, turning his Tarpan Studios in San Rafael into a magnet for a glittering constellation of pop, soul, R&B, rock and jazz stars.
Songs he wrote or produced have been featured in more than a dozen films, from 'Bright Lights, Big City' (1988) and 'License to Kill' (1989) to 'Free Willy' (1993) and the massive hit soundtrack for 'The Bodyguard,' the 1992 blockbuster starring Whitney Houston.
Even over the phone Waldon radiates live-wire energy, and it's easy to see how colliding with Efron's yoga-instructor calm could generate a yin/yang creative frisson.
Walden reached out to Efron after seeing a video about her songwriting process, and they almost instantly got into a groove, bouncing ideas back and forth. For 'Together We Run' he gave her a melody and chord structure, and he remembers 'she came back with something that was a very Bruce Springsteen vibe.'
'I was looking for a story,' he said, adding that he knew 'we had to get the right chorus.' When he played it for Journey guitarist Neil Schon, 'he liked it, so we got into it, and had Randy Jackson add his thing.'
The prolific collaboration seems to proceed in fits and starts as they exchange phrases, rhythms, choruses and bridges, often devising songs with particular artists in mind.
'I'll call her and text her and we send things back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I'm really relentless,' Walden admitted. 'The good thing about Rachel is she's fast. She can keep up with my pace, and she's willing to try things. The spirit can be finicky and wants what it wants. You have to be willing to go with the spirit, not just the mind.'
What's revelatory for Efron is that her new-found flexibility blossomed under Walden's insistent beat, enabling her to get out of her own head. Rather than grappling with her own perfectionism, the process of writing songs became 'this living, changing charisma between the two of us,' she said.
'I remember him telling me early on, 'You're great, you just need a boatload of confidence.' He meant it supportively, but also like, 'Fix this so it doesn't interfere with our work,'' she went on. 'I didn't realize how protected I felt in my identity as a 'struggling singer/songwriter' until he asked me to believe my work could reach more people.'
Efron, 46, grew up outside Portland, Maine, and moved to San Francisco in 2001 after realizing, during her last semester at Harvard University, that she wanted to become a singer-songwriter.
After performing around the region she released her debut album ' Say Goodbye ' in 2005, establishing her reputation as a quietly captivating performer with a gift for sensuous phrasing and emotionally insightful lyrics.
Several albums followed, though her recorded output has slowed in recent years to occasional singles, like 2020's ' Your Money Costs Too Much.' The fact that she surrounded herself with top-shelf musicians — drummer Scott Amendola; bassist and producer Jon Evans; trumpeter Erik Jekabson and vocalist and producer Julie Wolf — imbued each of her recordings with an inviting sheen of intelligent professionalism that enhanced her laid-back lyricism.
Without planning she seems to have been preparing herself to collaborate with Walden for years. Efron started thinking systematically about the nuts and bolts of songcraft in 2010 when Rob Ewing, the director of education at the Jazzschool in Berkeley, asked her to come up with a curriculum for a songwriting class.
'I went to a café and sat down and this 10-week course poured out of me,' she said.
She taught the class for a decade, a period in which her focus shifted from performing and recording to coaching emerging songwriters. She had no interest in producing other artists, but when one of former Jazzschool students Alison Gant, persuaded her to produce and arrange her debut album (2020's ' Calling All Good Wishes Home '), Efron found she loved midwifing other artists' recordings.
She's produced about a dozen albums since, including the acclaimed 2024 debut by David Hobbs, ' Searching for A Home,' as well as upcoming projects by Sierra Alyse and Norzin Chomphel — both of whom took the online Young Adult Songwriters Workshop she launched during the first year of the pandemic. (Efron also runs an online Songwriting Salon for tunesmiths of all ages.)
Chomphel was a 17-year-old El Cerrito High student when she took the workshop, and before the course was done she hired Efron to help develop some of her songs. A suggestion that Chomphel might want to extend the bridge of one piece, which would allow her to add a lyric, exemplifies Efron's approach in preproduction.
'She gives you guidance, and does teach you, but gives you complete responsibility over your own song,' Chomphel said. 'It makes a songwriter so much more confident.'
With Muzi, Efron is reaching a whole new constituency, inspired by confidence unleashed by Walden, a creative dervish presiding over a musical empire in Marin.