Singer-Songwriter Casey McQuillen Gives Teen Lessons in Growing Up

Casey McQuillen didn’t have the perfect-popular girl middle school life. In fact, she was bullied by a few girls and had a traumatizing event at a middle school dance, where she was told in front of everyone she is “gross.”

But years later the Massachusetts native, appeared on season 13 of American Idol, and she learned that what she was told in middle school was true - that “bullies bully because they are insecure.”

After watching the episode on television when judges Jennifer Lopez, Harry Connick Jr. and Keith Urban sent her to Hollywood she went to Twitter and saw that the same girls who bullied her in middle school were bullying her again.

“It was in that moment, when I was literally being the coolest I had ever been, and they were still talking about me,” said McQuillen to sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students at Fuller Middle School. They were still “trying to bring me down, and I had not seen them in eight years. And I realized it had never been my fault. ... I burst out laughing, and showed all my friends, as I didn’t care anymore.”

McQuillen brought her ”You Matters” tour to the Framingham Middle School on Friday.

The Berklee College graduate, now 23, created the tour to remind students that they matter.

She said she understands where they are now and she wanted to show them that you can be yourself and still achieve your dreams.

McQuillen started singing at an early age, and began writing songs when she was a teen. Her influences are Michelle Branch, Sara Bareilles, and Taylor Swift. The later’s influence you can hear in her original music.

She writes about learning to accept who you are, heartache, and the “bumps in the road that makes us unique.”

But when she appeared on season 13 of American Idol she felt she was in a crossroads for her career.

“Those three - pretty random - people’s opinions of me were supposed to define whether or not my entire career had any meaning,” McQuillen told Fuller Middle students. “I was walking into a room where I was being told that they had to think that my music and my career was worthwhile or that I should give up. And I really didn’t buy that because I had been singing for 10 years, before I walked on to that stage. And that whole time i was doing that because I love music.”

But after hearing praise and getting a ticket to Hollywood, McQuillen told the students I had to hide the fact that I was “not going all the way.” And when the episode finally aired months later “all of sudden everyone in the world knew my dirty little secret.”

But what happened next is that McQuillen learned that those who really supported her still supported her.

She said she hopes her tour teaches middle schoolers that they “matter” and they should pursue their dreams.

McQuillen performed an original song called Little Girl, she wrote when she was in middle school.

“At the beginning of the song she is a little girl. She dances because she loves to dance,” explained McQuillen. “But as time goes on it becomes a lot less about her love for dance and a lot more about what other people think. I wrote this song when I was your age because it was getting to the age where I was the only one still saying I want to be a pop star. Everyone else had let that go. ... I still wanted to be a pop star and I started to get nervous that I was going to fail, and everyone was going to know.”

But McQuillen explained the middle of Little Girl “is how I felt before I went on American Idol. That was my fear that I would try and I would not be good enough.”

She said the “fear at the end end of the song is how I feel now, after American Idol. And that is the fear that I am going to grow up, and grow old, and I’ll never know what could have been, if I really, really, really tried.

Little girl

She’s 45

And the world turned out too big

She’s really sick

And she don’t know

What’s happening

Now she dances in the rain

Where tears can always fade away

She spins and spins

Till she’s falling in

To the dreams she kept at bay

McQuillen also performed her original songs Beautiful and Enough for the students.

Beautiful McQuillen wrote after she learned that she had used makeup to hide her true self after the middle school dance incident.

Cause I’m 13 and the other kids are so mean

Why do they not like me?

Why do they not like me?

I hear them laugh behind my back

And it hurts but what’s worse

Is when they don’t see me at all

I’ve got my lipstick in my hand

‘Cause I just want to be like them

I just want to be beautiful

I can’t be invisible no more

I want to be beautiful

Enough McQuillan wrote for a friend who was battling an illness and be picked on for his looks as he was on the road to recovery.

She also performed Demi Lovato’s Skyscraper, which she sang for the American Idol judges to open her show at Fuller and sang Alicia Keyes Girl on Fire to close the performance.

McQuillen’s music can be downloaded on iTunes.