Mary Steenburgen Started Writing Music After Something Fascinating Happened to Her!

Mary Steenburgen is a frontrunner for an Oscar nomination this year, but it’s not for acting this time… it’s for songwriting!

The 66-year-old actress, who won an Oscar for acting back in 1981, is eligible for a Best Original Song nomination for writing the song “Glasgow” for the film Wild Rose.

Mary started songwriting 10 years ago after she woke up from minor arm surgery and couldn’t get music out of her mind.

“I felt strange as soon as the anesthesia started to wear off,” she told IndieWire. “The best way I can describe it is that it just felt like my brain was only music, and that everything anybody said to me became musical. All of my thoughts became musical. Every street sign became musical. I couldn’t get my mind into any other mode.”

“I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t have acted,” she added. “I couldn’t have learned any lines. My husband [actor Ted Danson] and I were kind of frightened about it.”

Mary teamed up with a friend one summer and wrote hundreds of songs. She sent 12 of the best ones to a music lawyer and she ended up getting signed as a songwriter to Universal. Years later, she started working with the filmmakers for Wild Rose and now she’s probably going to get an Oscar nomination!

“I didn’t fall out of love with acting when this happened and I still haven’t,” Mary said. “But there’s so much more capability in our brains than we probably realize, and agreeing to diminishment and shutting down doors is a choice that we all make for ourselves. It turns out you don’t really have to do that.”

Watch Jessie Buckley sing “Glasgow” here!