If you’re a music fan, your final weeks of 2024 may well have been dominated by discussion about Spotify Wrapped. That end-of-the-year feature allows users of the music streaming service to get a by-the-numbers rundown of their music consumption stats for the year. But for artists like Liv Greene, a folk singer-songwriter with northern Michigan roots, Spotify Wrapped has another utility: offering an at-a-glance look at just how far her music is reaching.

Greene’s music reached a lot of new ears in 2024, thanks to the October release of her sophomore album, Deep Feeler. The album, which Greene recorded live to tape in Nashville with an ace team of collaborators, scored acclaim from NPR, Bandcamp, No Depression, and Holler, garnering comparisons to the likes of Emmylou Harris, John Prine, and Gillian Welch. On Spotify, songs from Deep Feeler are included on popular staff-curated playlists like “Folk Alliance 2024” and “Indie Bluegrass,” the latter of which has been saved by more than a quarter-million users.

Based on her Wrapped, Greene tallied 122,000 Spotify streams from 41,000 different listeners in 124 different countries in 2024, totaling some 407,000 minutes of streaming. On Apple Music, listeners streamed 140,000 minutes of Greene’s music. She tells The Ticker it’s the biggest year she’s ever had as an artist.

Though Greene grew up in Washington, D.C. and now resides in Nashville, she credits much of her musical development to northern Michigan. After attending a Taylor Swift concert at the age of 11, Greene started using YouTube to teach herself how to play guitar. Soon, she was writing her first songs. Then, the summer after her sophomore year of high school, she attended Interlochen Arts Camp and set her sights on pursuing music as a career.

“I was 16 when I went to Interlochen, and I was just really ravenous to learn,” Greene says. “I didn’t have a musical community in D.C., but I found out about Interlochen online and it sounded amazing. I went up there and really just fell in love with so many things. My family fell in love with Michigan, and I fell in love with songwriting in a bigger way. That camp really changed my life.”

Lacking a musical community at home, Greene used Interlochen to forge a network of kids who were just as interested in songwriting and contemporary music as she was. Those connections included artists like Jack Schneider, now a guitarist with Vince Gill’s band (and the eventual executive producer on Deep Feeler); and Chappell Roan, the pop music phenom currently considered the betting favorite to win Best New Artist at this year’s Grammy Awards.

Greene ended up enrolling at Interlochen Arts Academy for her senior year, and her family was so smitten with northern Michigan that they built a house in Leelanau County. These days, when she isn’t writing songs, Greene is paying forward what she learned at Interlochen by teaching the next generation of songwriters.

“I’ve taught at Interlochen Arts Camp for the past two summers, which has been a really amazing full-circle kind of thing,” Greene says. “The songwriting program was pretty new when I went there for camp, but now they have a whole contemporary music program, so it’s really grown and changed a lot.”

Greene says songwriting programs have become more commonplace than they were 10 years ago – not just at the high school and college levels, but for younger students as well. She credits the “Taylor Swift effect,” or the fact that most of today’s biggest artists are regarded just as much for their songwriting as they are for being singers, performers, or entertainers.

“It definitely feels like it’s more of a legit thing for kids to be pursuing songwriting now, and to be naming it as what they’re interested in as a career at such a young age,” Greene says. “There’s a special thing happening there, and I think because of that, the Interlochen program has changed and become more about formal instruction. When I went to camp, it was a little funkier – as in ‘OK, go into the woods and write a song, and come back in an hour.’”

Even with a more formal approach, Greene says there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all tactic for teaching songwriting. That’s because each student might be entirely unique in terms of their skills and abilities, their musical influences and interests, and their songwriting goals.

“The most exciting thing about being an educator is that I have to meet the students where they are every summer,” she says. “Every kid needs something completely different in terms of what's going to help them wrap their head around the songwriting process a little better, or be able to perform better. How I approach things as a teacher really depends on the student and the song they bring.”

Greene says teaching others how be better songwriters has made her a better songwriter, too.

“A lot of the songs on Deep Feeler, I wrote in my own songwriting workshops,” Greene says. “I actually think I’ve learned the most about songwriting through teaching it, and through talking to students about it. It’s been so inspiring just being around young songwriters, and remembering that when I was that age, that’s when my love for music was really at its biggest. As you get into the industry, the well can definitely be a little poisoned by the pressure that you put on yourself. But back then, it was so pure. There are all these stressful things that happen when you make music a career, and they can take away the magic, so it’s been really cool just to get that back.”