She has been writing songs since middle school.

She studied music in college and is a music teacher now.

And she just released her third single — “Wish You Well.”

The producer on that single? Someone who has worked with Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande.

Photo provided to the Times Observer Sarah Monticue has released her third single - “Wish You Well.” She worked with a producer whose credits include names like Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande and recorded the video for the song, shown here, in the Cayman Islands before moving back to Warren.

“I’ve been writing songs my whole life, really,” Monticue said in a recent interview.

She still has a journal of songs she wrote in middle school and high school. Her first song was recorded at a studio on Pennsylvania Avenue.

After high school, she studied music in college and then worked in a role where she was organizing “a bunch of different bands and songs.”

In recent years, her music has taken a much more personal shift.

And that’s where “Wish You Well” comes in.

“During the past few years, I realized that I just wanted to write about life and wanted to share the things that I had been through,” she explained. So she put her stuff out there on SoundBetter, a site designed to connect singers with producers.

That’s when she reached out to Matthew Tryba, whose credits include Grande, Swift and One Direction.

“That’s part of what drew me to him,” Monticue said, calling herself a “huge Taylor Swift fan. I really admire her as a song-writer. When the album “Red” came out, it really resonated with me. I appreciated how she poured herself into that. I felt like that inspired me.”

Monticue started a dialogue with Tryba, shared some of her work with him and “talked through the songs he thought were the most promising and we worked on them together.”

And that process posed its own challenges.

“Especially this song, ‘Wish You Well,’ I really worked hard on that one,” she said. “He pushed me to do better with the lyrics, with the story-telling…. With hindsight, I’m so glad that he pushed me to improve the verses. It really made the song stronger.

“That was a great opportunity, to have somebody kind of push me in my song writing.”

There’s only so much work that can be done remotely, though, so she eventually flew out to Denver for 10 days to record the songs in his home studio.

The song was released in late March and can be found on the front page of her website — sarahmonticue.com.

“‘Wish You Well’ is a song about being done with all the things that aren’t good for you anymore,” she explained. “Being done with toxic relationships that need to leave behind, all the things that make you feel worthless.”

That’s the heart of the message for what she wants people to take away from the song.

“When we leave those things behind, we can connect with who we really are… our magic,” she said. “My hope is that despite what anybody has gone through… that felt like it destroyed you, that you would feel like you are ready to fly.

“You are so much more than what happened to you, so much more than anything that dragged you down,” she explained. “I hope people — especially women and girls — watch the video and think, ‘I can embrace all that I am, and I don’t need to make myself smaller to make other people more comfortable.’ That’s part of the beauty of the imagery woven into the video — being a mermaid, being a phoenix, being a human…you can be all those things at the same time. You can be multi-faceted.”

Now that the song is out there, one of the challenges is defining success — what makes a project like this successful?

Monticue said that’s “something that I am grappling with personally because I do think in the music industry… there’s this term ‘Make it. Are you going to make it?’…. I think in some ways saying that term is unhelpful in the way we then think about musicians in our mind.”

“Part of success as an artist is simply making your work and putting it into the world,” she said. “Putting it out there because they believe in it…. I’ve been trying to kind of reframe my own idea of success where it’s not based on that kind of capitalist idea of making it.”

Part of success is also overcoming the challenges of the creative process.

Monticue said she was living with her husband, Jason Knox, in the Cayman Islands and had only a couple weeks to film for the video. Backup dancers weren’t showing up. There was the hard work put into the lyrics. There were video editing challenges.

With this project wrapped up, she’s got some thoughts on what’s next for her music.

She plans to create a Patreon page to allow people to join her on the journey.

“I think when you have people that want to just be in something together, it makes everything feel better,” she said.

The dance routine in the video, which she also created, has also opened some doors.

“Really, my love for dance developed by taking lessons at Linda Dies dance studio,” she said. “Even just being able to put that love of dance into this song and video and be able to put that out there meant so much because it felt like reconnecting with part of myself.

“I really wanted a song that was going to make you feel like you really wanted to dance.”

She’s been teaching the routine to some friends and has also had some of her students at Tidioute Community Charter School wanting to learn it. There’s also the possibility of more exposure via dance challenges on social media networks like TikTok.

Monticue and Knox moved back to the area from the Cayman Islands for her to be able to care for her grandfather, Jim Miller.

“It was funny because I was nervous to share the song with him. I wasn’t sure if he was going to like it,” she said. “He’s a huge Frank Sinata fan…. It’s been fun to see him embrace the song. He really has been supportive of all my songs. That’s just been a beautiful thing for me.”

She’s also grateful for the support of her mother, Grace Backstrom, and husband, who was “super supportive of my whole project” and was cameraman for the video.

That family and community support isn’t lost on her.

“I think that means so much, to have people in life that are willing to do that,” she said. “I think sometimes we take it for granted, or even when we leave and come back, it makes you appreciate it more.

“This is such a supportive community where people take care of each other (and) want to be excited about what people around here are doing.”