Whenever Lauren Alaina is having a bad day, you can probably find the  'American Idol' contestant with a pen in her hand, writing songs. It's a craft the 18-year old has grown to love and appreciate about being a musical performer.

Lauren's newest single, 'Barefoot and Buckwild' is the first single that she wrote, which has her a little nervous. But she loves the process. In a recent interview with Radio.com, Alaina explained that she finds inner peace when songwriting:

“I’ve learned so much about myself and my music just from sitting in those rooms and creating different sounds. I really write about what’s on my mind. It’s like a stress reliever."

Lauren has taken on songwriting - as many do - as a form of stress relief. She's in the process of writing her second album, and while she is planning on using "the best songs" even if they're not her writes, Alaina is coming up with plenty of her own material for the record, drawing on heartbreak and sadness, and bringing it out in her songs.

"I didn’t realize when I first started writing how much it would set me free from certain situations in my life. It's incredible...I was having a hard day, dealing with the fact that my grandfather has Alzheimer’s and I wrote about it, and then I wrote a song about my ex-boyfriend, who was terrible and the worst boyfriend I’ve ever had in my entire life, and I got a great song out of him so I can thank him for that."

Lauren may have just graduated from high school, but her take on songwriting and the therapeutic values it holds qualify her as something of an "old soul". Check out the entire interview here:

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