BY BRIAN KIDD for WEEKLY VOLCANO | 9/18/2026
After spending 15 years writing songs for other performers, Alynn Naylor is finally keeping some for herself.
Based in Snohomish County, where she lives on a rescue horse ranch, Naylor is preparing to release a new album and memoir after a life shaped by music, grief, and difficult collaborations. But Naylor is also no stranger to Tacoma. She remembers playing the Viaduct as a young punk and returned to perform at the Spanish Ballroom last April.
A Sacramento native whose sound has been described as indie folk, alt-country, and Americana, Naylor grew up surrounded by music, including the work of her father, a professional guitarist and session musician. Music was ingrained in her family’s culture; it was part of how they communicated.
“My childhood memories are colored by guitars, recording gear, the assorted colorful personalities those things tend to attract, and the songs they were writing,” Naylor said. “I had grandfathers who would jam out to Nirvana, cousins who spent powwow seasons playing drums and singing traditional songs, and a really cool New Yorker uncle with a wicked record collection who taught me about the Rolling Stones, the Police, Springsteen, and so much else.”
Naylor wrote her first song in the fourth grade and bought her first guitar shortly after that. Although her father was a guitar expert, Naylor, always the independent spirit, decided to buy one on her own: a Strat-style copy by Kramer with a tobacco burst finish.
“Because I refused to buy a Fender or anything I perceived as mainstream,” Naylor said. “My dad was actually a little hurt because I did it without telling him, but for some reason, it was really important in my preteen brain that my first guitar was something separate from him.”
That guitar became the catalyst that brought father and daughter together over music. They bonded over their current playlists, and he would teach her tricks on the guitar. One of her favorite listening exercises was to wait for the theme from a popular TV show to begin and try to learn it by ear before it would end. “I played the themes from Xena and The X-Files until my fingers ached. I bought guitar magazines and learned songs from tabs like every other music-obsessed kid before YouTube existed.”
By her teens, Naylor was constantly playing live, including in a Megadeth cover band. She was having the time of her life, and then on her 18th birthday, tragedy struck. Her father died unexpectedly.
“He took a lot of me with him,” she said. “For a few months after he died, I tried in vain to finish the record he’d been working on and, frankly, tried in vain to stay engaged in my own life. I don’t remember a whole lot of anything before the age of 20. It’s mostly a haze of grief and really poor life decisions.”
Despite her father’s warnings about the music business, Naylor decided to follow her heart and pursue her own musical aspirations. Her father taught her to be incredibly skeptical of what it takes to earn fame as a musician, including changing your image just to be marketable.
“He wasn’t suspicious of ambition,” Naylor said. “He was suspicious of what ambition might convince you to surrender in order to get what you wanted.”
At the age of 21, Naylor was still overcome with grief until fate intervened in the form of a mentor and fellow musician. That mentor encouraged Alynn to become a songwriter for other musicians, rather than a performer. “He and I had one of those courageous, big-brother conversations with a stupid grieving kid that ultimately changed my life,” Naylor said. “I’m not gonna lie: At the time, it felt a little like failing. In retrospect, it was an absolute godsend and probably a genuine intervention.”
Over the next 15 years, Naylor built a financially sustainable career writing for other performers. During the pandemic, an unusual opportunity placed her in heavily funded songwriting sessions with established artists who quarantined together, although nondisclosure agreements have prevented her from naming them.
“I was basically the C-team under an extremely weird set of circumstances,” Naylor said. “That turned into one of the most important opportunities of my career.”
After years of accumulating fragments of personal songs, Naylor returned to her own material when a friend playfully dared her to perform it. She wrote her single “Whiskey” about a collaboration whose collapse cost her emotionally and financially.
“‘Whiskey’ was exactly the kind of song I would normally have sold immediately because of the storytelling and the hook. But the more I played it, the more I sang it, the more it felt like ‘Yeah … there it is. That one is mine.’”
After writing songs for others for 15 years, Naylor said that there really wasn’t a grand decision when she started releasing music under her own name again. The decision just naturally evolved from timing and experience: She grew up and realized she was mature enough to release her own music.
Today, Naylor, whose influences span everything from PJ Harvey to Styx’s Tommy Shaw, balances her time between taking collaborative trips to her house in Northern Ireland, overlooking the Irish Sea, and rescuing difficult horses while living on a Snohomish County ranch. She’s half-jokingly dubbed herself a “feral horse witch.”
“Songs are how I process things,” Naylor said. “Horses are how I learn to let things go once they’re processed.”
Alongside horses, Naylor also has love for the Tacoma music scene, which she describes as “community-driven,” with an infrastructure that exists because people built it themselves.
“[In Tacoma,] there are people there who aren’t just trying to build careers,” she said. “They’re actively building a place where careers can happen. That’s exactly the kind of scene I want to keep getting invited into.”
Naylor’s new single, “The Trouble With You,” drops in a few weeks, followed by several more singles leading up to her full-length record, Whiskey and Warnings. Preorders for her memoir, So We Never Finished the Record, will also be available soon.
The memoir traces a series of absurd circumstances that prevented one of her musical collaborations from resulting in a record. She had signed a record deal with a friend, but the record itself was never produced. She intended to write a book about that 24-month period, but it ended up inspiring a personal memoir about parts of her life other than the record that wasn’t to be.
“It is a music memoir,” she said, “but I think, more than anything, it’s a story about grief. And I know that makes it sound terribly depressing. I promise, it’s a lot funnier than that.”
You can keep up with Naylor’s music and other musings on Instagram (@alynn_naylor). Although she likes to showcase her personality and parts of her musical process online, she is not entirely enamored with modern methods of promotion via social media.
“Part of the reason I’ve grown my audience fairly quickly,” Naylor admitted, “is because I stopped thinking exclusively about finding fans and started thinking about teaching the algorithm who my fans were. That means repeating formats, language, and imagery until eventually, the machine goes, ‘Oh, I understand who wants this.’ And I fucking hate that.”
“Not a single one of us picked up a guitar because we dreamed of becoming really good at training an algorithm,” she added. “Unfortunately, it works.”
To learn more about Alynn Naylor and read her new blog, “Field Notes,” visit alynnnaylor.com.
