Most teenagers spend their afternoons on homework, part-time jobs, or scrolling through their phones. A handful of musicians spent those same hours writing songs that would eventually top charts, win Grammys, or become generational anthems. Their stories span seven decades, from doo-wop harmonies in the 1950s to bedroom pop uploaded straight from a laptop.
What connects them isn’t just talent, though there’s plenty of that. It’s the strange timing of catching a creative spark before adulthood even starts, often while juggling algebra homework or a curfew. Here are thirteen artists who managed exactly that.
1. Taylor Swift wrote “Tim McGraw” in a freshman math class
Taylor Swift was fourteen and sitting in her freshman year math class at Hendersonville High School when the melody for what would become her debut single came to her. She wrote “Tim McGraw” in her high-school freshman math class, when she was dating a senior about to head off to college and wanted to capture everything about her that would remind him of her. After school that day, she headed to co-writer Liz Rose’s office and the two finished the song in about fifteen minutes.
The single was released in 2006 when Swift was sixteen, and it peaked at number forty on the Billboard Hot 100 while climbing to number six on the country chart. It’s easy to forget now, given everything that followed, but the song that launched one of the biggest careers in music history was born out of a distracted moment in class rather than a calculated career move.
2. Lorde wrote “Royals” during a school holiday
Ella Yelich-O’Connor, better known as Lorde, was fifteen when she sat down at her family home in Auckland and wrote the lyrics to “Royals” in roughly half an hour. She wrote her debut single, ‘Royals,’ in just half an hour at her home in July 2012, when she was fifteen years old, and celebrated her sixteenth birthday a few months later. The song was written during a break from school, a detail that feels almost quaint given what it became.
By the time it topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 2013, Lorde was sixteen, making her the first female solo artist to top the Alternative Songs chart since the mid-1990s. She’d been discovered years earlier at a school talent show, but the writing itself happened on her own terms, on her own schedule, in her own bedroom.
3. Olivia Rodrigo wrote “drivers license” while finishing high school online
Olivia Rodrigo was seventeen and completing her senior year of high school through online classes when “drivers license” was released in January 2021. She was finishing her senior year of high school online, between busy shoots on location for High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, the Disney+ show in which she co-starred. Balancing acting, homework, and songwriting all at once, she managed to write one of the defining pop songs of the decade.
The track debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and shattered streaming records within days of its release. Born on February 20, 2003, she was just shy of her eighteenth birthday when the song claimed the number one spot, making her one of the youngest artists ever to top the Hot 100.
4. Billie Eilish and Finneas wrote “Ocean Eyes” for a high school band first
Before it became Billie Eilish’s breakout single, “Ocean Eyes” had a different life entirely. Finneas originally wrote “Ocean Eyes” for his high school band, the Slightlys, before realizing that the story was better suited around his sister’s vocals. Billie was just thirteen when she recorded her vocals for the track, which the siblings uploaded to SoundCloud in November 2015.
The song went viral almost overnight and eventually led to a deal with Interscope Records. “Ocean Eyes” was solely written and produced by Eilish’s brother Finneas O’Connell, who originally wrote it for his band, but later gave the song to Eilish after feeling the song suited her vocals. It’s a rare case of a hit written for one act and handed off to another, both still teenagers at the time.
5. Alessia Cara built her songwriting chops in high school before “Here” broke through
Long before “Here” became a radio staple, Alessia Cara was quietly building an audience from her bedroom in Brampton, Ontario. She started a YouTube channel at thirteen, taught herself guitar, and kept her musical ambitions largely private from classmates during her high school years. It wasn’t the kind of thing she advertised at school, even as she was steadily writing and refining material.
She didn’t sign with Def Jam Recordings until she was eighteen, but the songwriting instincts that shaped her debut single took root well before that deal, during her final years of high school. “Here,” with its wallflower’s-eye view of a party she’d rather skip, resonated because it sounded like it came from someone who’d actually lived that awkward teenage moment, not someone imagining it from a distance.
6. Frankie Lymon co-wrote a doo-wop classic at thirteen
Long before teen pop was a marketing category, Frankie Lymon was already living it. He was just thirteen years old when he helped write “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” the 1956 single that turned him and his group, the Teenagers, into overnight sensations. The song’s simple, aching question about young love became one of the defining doo-wop records of the era.
Lymon’s voice, still unmistakably that of a child, gave the song an authenticity that older singers couldn’t fake. It reached the top of the R&B charts and crossed over into the pop Top Ten, making Lymon one of the youngest hitmakers in American music history at a time when the industry barely had a category for someone his age.
7. Janis Ian wrote “Society’s Child” at fourteen
Janis Ian was only fourteen when she wrote “Society’s Child,” a song about an interracial teenage relationship that many radio stations initially refused to play. Released in 1965, the track’s unflinching look at racial prejudice was startling coming from someone barely old enough to drive, let alone process the backlash it received.
The song eventually found its audience after conductor Leonard Bernstein championed it on a television special, and it climbed into the Billboard Top 20 the following year. Ian’s willingness to tackle a subject most adult songwriters avoided entirely gave the record a weight that outlasted the controversy surrounding it.
8. Carole King wrote “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” as a teenager
Carole King was still a teenager when she composed the melody for “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” working with her then-husband and lyricist Gerry Goffin. The song, recorded by the Shirelles in 1960, became the first single by an all-female group to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100.
King’s ability to write a melody that felt both delicate and urgent, capturing the anxiety of a young woman weighing intimacy against uncertainty, set the tone for a songwriting career that would span decades. It’s a striking piece of work from someone who hadn’t been out of her teens for very long, if at all, when she wrote it.
9. Paul Anka wrote “Diana” as a teenager himself
Paul Anka was around fifteen or sixteen when he wrote “Diana,” reportedly inspired by an older babysitter he had a crush on. Released in 1957, the song became a massive international hit, selling millions of copies and establishing Anka as one of the first true teen idols in American pop music.
What’s notable is that Anka wrote, performed, and essentially managed the early stages of his own career while other kids his age were worrying about report cards. “Diana” gave him the financial independence to keep writing, and he went on to pen hits for decades afterward, proving the early success wasn’t a fluke.
10. Ritchie Valens wrote rock and roll hits before he could legally drive
Ritchie Valens was just sixteen or seventeen when he wrote “Come On, Let’s Go” and adapted the traditional Mexican folk song “La Bamba” into an electrified rock and roll version. Both tracks came out in 1958, blending his Mexican-American heritage with the emerging sound of American rock.
Valens died in a plane crash in February 1959 at only seventeen, which makes the body of work he left behind even more remarkable. “La Bamba” in particular became one of the first rock hits performed largely in Spanish to break into the mainstream American charts, a milestone he achieved before most of his peers had graduated.
11. Dolly Parton wrote and recorded a single at thirteen
Dolly Parton’s earliest professional recording, “Puppy Love,” was written and recorded when she was just thirteen years old, released as a single in 1959. It didn’t chart nationally, but it marked the beginning of a songwriting career that would eventually produce hundreds of songs, including several that became country and pop standards.
Parton has often talked about writing songs from a very young age, long before she had the means to record them properly. That early single is a small but telling data point in a career built almost entirely on her own pen, decades before “Jolene” or “I Will Always Love You” made her a household name.
12. Tate McRae wrote “you broke me first” as a sixteen-year-old
Tate McRae was sixteen when “you broke me first” was released in April 2020, a track she wrote alongside songwriter Victoria Zaro and producer Blake Harnage. McRae recalls her lyric, “But I don’t really care how bad it hurts, cause you broke me first,” being praised in the studio, and says writing and recording the song was a quick process.
The song eventually climbed to number seventeen on the Billboard Hot 100, a slow-building success driven largely by streaming and social media rather than traditional radio. McRae, a former competitive dancer, had already spent years performing before she pivoted toward songwriting, and this track became the moment that pivot clearly paid off.
13. Avril Lavigne co-wrote “Complicated” at seventeen
Avril Lavigne was still a teenager, having signed her first record deal at sixteen while enrolled at her high school in Napanee, Ontario, when she began working on what would become “Complicated.” The song introduced the world to a seventeen-year-old Lavigne from Napanee, Ontario, whose skater-inspired look set her apart from the polished pop stars dominating the charts at the time. She co-wrote the track with production team the Matrix, released in March 2002.
The single reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent sixteen consecutive weeks in the chart’s Top Ten, an unusually long run for a debut single. It also helped define an entire aesthetic, one built around teenage frustration with fakeness and performative cool, themes Lavigne clearly understood firsthand as a teenager herself.
Taken together, these thirteen stories say something about how songwriting actually works. Talent doesn’t wait for a diploma, and some of the most emotionally direct songs in popular music came from writers who hadn’t yet lived long enough to overthink what they were saying. That rawness, whether it shows up in a doo-wop record from 1956 or a bedroom pop upload from 2015, tends to be exactly what makes a song land.
