Gaya is mind-blowing. She helps me with my songs from time to time. She can either swap out a word or a line, or find a different language for a thought, or keep the lyric and change the rhythm or tighten up the melody, and it instantly makes the song greater.

I've seen her work on camps. She can turn a 10-minute long conversation with the artist into a song, that she'll have written within an hour, and the artist is in awe of seeing how their thoughts have been put into a beautiful, consistent song. She feels deeply, is has a way of asking precise questions, actively listening and turning into art for herself and other artists. She is into deep meanings and nuanced. She juggles them in English, Russian, German and Spanish. Her own songs are soft ballads and stadium-ready hits. Since she hasn't been releasing her music, I am privileged to have been shown demos and been to her life concerts. She writes he songs in a way that it makes you sing along immediately and be mesmerized with how she comes up with these stories and puts them into awesome lyrics and melodies.

Lyric writing is one of the most important skills that musicians should consistently work on improving. It might not be obvious that I, a manager in music, would have to work on as well. I did not think it would be something I would end up needing. But I get sent lots of songs and tracks for feedback — by my artists and just songwriter friends — to evaluate if it has potential and is worth investing in promoting it. Sometimes giving feedback cabe mentally taxing. Most of the time, the problems are weak, generic lyrics. But it so hard to explain to a musician who has poured his soul and pain into every line.

I took all of Gaya's courses and mentorship to be able not just say "Boring, not clever, doesn't do it for me" but have the opportunity to give productive feedback: what to pay attention to, how to re-write, where to start. I pieced together my sporadic knowledge of songwriting into a system, learned so many tips and tricks, had so much fun that I started writing myself. Gaya's way of teaching is like a musical LEGO: she first dissects a hit song as a huge puzzle, then you're trying to put these tools and hacks into something similar, and then you are blown away that you can put them together and get something entirely different, but cool, and yours. And it's just easy and fun. It's rare to be given so much information and not feel overwhelmed and powerless, but it made me on the contrary feel so inspired and powerful. Gaya made is so much fun.