Faith Morante is not a person who finds it easy to explain how she feels. She is, however, someone who can write it down in a way that makes other people feel it too.
Morante, a Senior Software Engineer who has been with X-Team for well over two years, recently shared two songs in X-Team's internal music channel — zmbs and guiding sign — for which she wrote the lyrics. Both tracks are collaborations with a musician friend. Both are quietly personal. "Writing lyrics has always been about storytelling for me," she says. "They're a way for me to express myself."
In this story, Morante explains her creative process for writing lyrics, shares the stories behind the 2 songs and describes where she hopes her songwriting ambitions will take her next.
Emotion First, Words Second
Morante's process starts where every lyric starts: with a feeling. "It always comes off the emotions I feel and the experiences I've had," she says. "I'm not so good at explaining my emotions to people, but with lyrics or poems, I don't have to be. Instead, I can tell stories, and I feel like I can express those stories better through lyrics."
From that emotional starting point, the actual writing is almost automatic. A few words or lines arrive first, and the rest follow. She asks herself guiding questions to keep momentum — whether she can ask a question about the emotion, what parallels or opposites she can work in, whether the words she's chosen are too difficult to pronounce. The questions are diagnostic, not prescriptive. "I actually don't know how it works," she says, "but it's a really fun process for me."
Working with her musician friend adds another layer. Once she has lyrics, she gives him song references so he understands the sound she's going after. zmbs, for instance, draws heavily from the Beatles. "I wanted it to sound like Strawberry Fields Forever," she says. She monitors the music closely as it takes shape — particularly the placeholder words her collaborator inserts. As a lyricist first, she makes sure every word in the finished song serves the story.
The Stories the Songs Tell
Both zmbs and guiding sign are personal, but in different registers.
zmbs is the more exposed of the two. Morante is bipolar, and the song documents her experience during a hospitalization for a manic episode — a period when she felt unable to be herself, moving through days in a fog. "I felt constrained," she says. "I think it's important to share this with the world to raise awareness about mental health, which is why I wrote zmbs." The title's suggestion of zombies is not incidental.
guiding sign came together differently. It grew from a small, odd collision of moments: an argument with someone, followed immediately by a stranger asking her for directions. That juxtaposition prompted a larger question about the difference between giving directions to someone who is open to receiving them and trying to guide someone who is not. The song is a meditation on receptiveness — rendered as something you could hum on a commute.
The hardest part of writing, Morante says, is that she composes lyrics without knowing what the music around them will sound like. She is writing to a silence her collaborator will eventually fill. Rhyming is its own challenge — "hard, but a fun kind of hard."
The Album She's Working Toward
Morante's short-term goal is an album on Spotify. She envisions something like what Harry Styles does: no unifying theme, just a collection of her own stories and experiences, some happy and some mellow. It's a format she admires for its honesty and its lack of pretense.
Beyond the album, she wants to help her musician friend build something sustainable — eventually finding him management so they can produce more together. X-Team's Unleash+ budget has already made the current collaboration possible, letting her afford to turn lyrics into produced music rather than keeping them on a page.
For a software engineer whose daily work is precise, structured and rarely autobiographical, lyric writing offers the inverse: unstructured, emotional and thoroughly her own. The songs she cannot say out loud, she writes instead.
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