Courtney Harrell on Her Own Secret for ‘Navigating the Music Industry’

Courtney Harrell’s credits in the music business represent such a wide range of experience that her career reads like the tracklist on the ultimate industry mixtape: each hard-won achievement is a song in a different tempo, key, and genre. At the age of 15 she began studying music with Berklee’s City Music program, and attended undergrad on a full scholarship. She has co-written songs that have been sung by Mary J. Blige, Ariana Grande, Beyoncé, and more. She has written music featured in shows like Grey’s Anatomy and movies like Think Like a Man. She has taught music in public schools. She has toured with John Legend as a background singer. She was a semi-finalist on The Voice (watch her amazing audition below!), and now she’s a producer on America’s Got Talent. She says she has been able to build such a versatile résumé by following her inner compass, which she refers to as “the snap.”

Courtney says she was first able to identify “the snap” when working with vocal coach Nick Cooper. At the time she was at a crossroads in her career. She had penned a number of hits for well-known artists, but because of the nature of streaming service payment models, the royalties weren’t sufficient enough to keep her afloat. She lost her house. She was preparing to launch her career as a singer, but then she lost her voice. Nodules had developed on her vocal cords, so the sessions with Cooper were essential, if she wanted to continue.

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“So Nick did this exercise with me where he had me close my eyes and I needed to follow his voice from the other side of the warehouse,” she recounts. “And then he was snapping as he was talking to me.” 

She says experiencing the snap in the echo of Cooper’s studio was a revelation because although she was able to hear what the vocal coach was saying, she could feel the snap inside of her body, which was much more valuable.

“He said, ‘If you don’t learn how to master this in your life, you won’t be able to learn how to pivot when your voice is doing something that it shouldn’t be doing.’ And essentially I was healed, which as evidence of that is being on The Voice,” she says. “I would liken my career to that: It’s like listening to someone chatting, ‘This is what you need to be doing,’ But that snap is like, ‘Nope, I’m over here. I’m over here and this is where you need to be.’ Everyone was saying, ‘This is how you make it,’ but that’s not how I made it. I made it by paying attention to, ‘but now I’m over here.’ And so sometimes that ‘over here’ for me was teaching kids in Boston Public Schools.” 

Not so coincidentally, the most recent hit that Courtney Harrell co-wrote is called “SNAP.” Recorded by Rosa Linn and released in 2022, the song currently has more than 1.3 billion streams on Spotify. And the way that Courtney Harrell came to co-write it came from following her own snap. She was working in casting for America’s Got Talent at the time, and she had reached another crossroads.

“I had said, ‘Listen, if you want me on this team, I have to have my hands on the talent. I cannot give it over to people who don’t know what they’re doing,’” she recalls. “This was the year before I stepped into the producer role, and similar to now, I was like, ‘I need to get away and I need to write,’ and I got a call about going to Armenia to teach young musicians how to write a pop hit. And I was like, ‘okay, I don’t know what the heck I’m going to do in Armenia, but it is an answered prayer.’”

She says while she was teaching, Rosa Linn came up with the idea for “SNAP,” which leans into different meanings of the word “snap” than the snap that guides Courtney Harrell. The song is about people giving the narrator unwanted advice to just snap her fingers and get over her heartache, but if she has to hear one more person say that, she just might, well, snap. But with this many streams, you probably know what the song is about already.

“The genesis of that record is hers,” says Harrell about Rosa Linn, “it’s just me helping her bring it to life, which I think is aligned with what this class is supposed to be about. It’s finding ways to communicate what it is that you have to say to the world, and finding ways to frame it, whether that’s in a song, when you’re recording that song, or whether you’re in the and boardroom, trying to pitch to your team why they need to do whatever you feel that they need to do. It’s the same skill, just framing it differently.”

When Harrell mentions “this class,” she’s talking about the masterclass that she is teaching with Berklee Online on August 5, entitled Get Heard: Promoting Yourself & Navigating The Music Industry. In it she’ll detail how “the snap” has led her to trust her instincts in a way that has paid off in a notoriously difficult-to-navigate industry.

“I want to make sure the students are prepared because there really is no preparing for this business unless you get out there, and most people are selling snake oil,” she says. “It’s not what you think it is. Let me tell you what it really is and how to best prepare yourself for it. I’m grateful for this because it’s a chance for me to go back and say what I wish someone had said to me.”