## Music as Autobiography
The nine tracks on Heartstrings represent the most explicitly personal creative work in Leighton Meester’s public career. She wrote all of them. She produced them with Jeff Trott, a collaborator with a specific sensibility shaped by years of working with Sheryl Crow — a musician whose own trajectory from commercial success to artistic specificity offers an interesting parallel. She funded the album herself, after leaving the major label system that had produced the pop singles.
The songs are not autobiographical in the confessional mode — they do not narrate specific events from her biography in ways that map onto the documented facts of her life. They are autobiographical in the way that most good songwriting is autobiographical: they reflect a specific sensibility, a specific emotional register, a specific way of engaging with experience that is the songwriter’s own.
The track “L.A.” is the most explicitly geographical of the album’s songs, and it reflects on what living in Los Angeles means to someone who arrived there as a teenager and built a life there over fifteen-plus years. The relationship between the city and the person who has grown up in it, professionally and personally, is a specific kind of intimacy — the city becomes the landscape of the self in a way that is different from the relationship one has with a city one moved to as an adult with an already-formed identity. Meester arrived in Los Angeles at fourteen. The city is, in a meaningful sense, where she became who she is.