Penny Laussade’s musical career is just getting started

Penny Laussade likes when her guitars break.

When the bridges of her guitars begin to lift after years of use, it means she gets to spend hours at Guitar Center, sitting in the acoustic room at the back of the store while her dad brings her guitar after guitar to strum.

Sitting in the humidified room, surrounded by guitars hanging on the walls, she carefully runs her fingertips over the chords of the instrument resting on her lap. She knows she needs to meticulously choose her next guitar.

Laussade, a senior at Lake Highlands High School, has been musically inclined since she was 4 years old. In fact, she composed her first song with her dad at that same age.

“My parents started me on the piano when I was like 10, and I didn’t love it,” Laussade says. “I got angry with it all the time. I played for about two or three more years, and then I got my guitar.”

She says she didn’t feel the same resentment toward the guitar that she had felt toward the piano.

“A guitar is only yours. It’s very mobile, and you can take it anywhere,” she says. “I like it more because it feels more personal, and there’s more variation to it.”

With her mind set on making the guitar her instrument of choice, she asked her piano instructor to teach her how to play classical guitar. From there, she began using it as a tool to accompany her singing. But singing and playing guitar together created something more: a performance.

Then, one night at her mom’s nonprofit event, Laussade found an opportunity. She built up the courage to ask Vector Brewing owner Craig Bradley, who was in attendance, if she could perform at the brewery.

“I was really scared, but I went up to him and asked him, and he was like, ‘Oh yeah, we’d love to have you,’” Laussade says.

For the past two years, Laussade has been performing every six weeks at the brewery, where she mainly covers folk, indie and country songs, drawing on her background in classical guitar.

Her performances have become more than just singing in front of a crowd. Laussade brings her famous stool. Besides sitting on it, she asks the audience, who have watched her grow as a musician, to sign the legs of the stool.

She even recently started playing some of her original songs that she saves for the end of her performance.

“I think that I gained almost all of my confidence as a performer by performing my own music because I get to showcase my own stuff,” she says.

Laussade has five completed songs but typically plays only two at a time. She began writing her first song, “Burn,” in eighth grade, imagining a young girl wishing for her ex-boyfriend to burn after he’s finished lying to her.

“‘Burn’ has definitely changed over the years as I’ve grown into it,” she says. “I hadn’t had any romantic experiences then when I wrote it, and I kind of imagined how it would be.”

With college around the corner, Laussade hopes to produce and release “Burn” on streaming platforms before she graduates high school.

But as she looks toward college, Laussade is still figuring out where music fits into her future.

“I’ve been conflicted with that for a while,” she says. “I’ve been looking at UT-Austin, which has a very intimidating music program, but I’ve also been looking at Belmont University in Nashville that has a lot of majors regarding business music and songwriting.”

Laussade’s mom, Alice, says songwriting has helped Laussade when she’s experienced teenage blues.

“(Songwriting) is just something that’s just really soothing for her,” Alice says. “I think that’s been a really good mental support for her throughout the good and bad times in life.”

Laussade says she writes mainly at night. About everything.

Between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. when she can’t sleep, she finds herself sitting in her desk chair with song lyrics floating through her mind.

“(The guitar) has become meditation,” she says. “I get really restless sometimes when I’m on vacation or just out of town for something, and I don’t have it with me.”