EDITOR’S NOTE: This story has been updated with Schell’s victory.
In 2020, Sara Schell was planning to move to London to study business after graduating high school in Venezuela. On Thursday (Nov. 12), she won the Latin Grammy Award for songwriter of the year, and was also nominated for best pop song as a co-writer of Kany García’s “A La Niña Que Fui.”
Related
At 23, Schell was not the only woman in the songwriter of the year category, but she was the only newcomer. She appeared alongside veterans like Edgar Barrera (who boasted 82 Latin Grammy nominations and 29 wins, including songwriter of the year for the past three years), Yoel Henríquez (who had garnered 23 nominations and three victories), Iván Gámez and Jenni Mosello (with a total of four nominations each).
Her credits listed by the Latin Recording Academy included “A La Niña Que Fui” by García, “Ahí Estabas Tú” and “Barco de Papel” by Fonseca, “Bendito” by Rawayana, “Si Te Vas” by J Balvin and Jay Wheeler (which reached No. 1 on Billboard‘s Latin Airplay chart), and “Vas a Quedarte” by Diego Torres and Manuel Carrasco. She’s also been behind chart hits like “Gabriela” by KATSEYE (No. 21 on the Hot 100), “Mercedes” by Becky G and Óscar Maydon (No. 1 on Regional Mexican Airplay) and “Ojos verdes” by Nicki Nicole (No. 1 on the Billboard Argentina Hot 100).
But how did this young woman from Barquisimeto go from wanting to study business to writing for major stars?
“In 2020, I graduated high school and then the pandemic hit, so we decided to move to Mexico. When we arrived, I was supposed to go to London to study business because I had always said I wanted a career, but at that moment, all the universities were shut down, so we had to do what everyone else did: stay home and find something to do,” Schell tells Billboard Español in an interview from Spain during a break from a songwriting session. “I started posting covers and other things on Instagram, and that’s how I connected with several writers online, started doing Zoom sessions and writing together.”
Schell’s musical training began at the age of four at the Vicente Emilio Sojo Conservatory, a prestigious institution founded in 1936 in Barquisimeto, Lara State, which works closely with Venezuela’s National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras and Choirs, a.k.a. El Sistema. There, she played the cello until she was 14 — a “super magical experience” that allowed her to travel to Peru and the U.S. representing her country. She also took piano and singing lessons.
At 15, she wrote her first song, “Sin Ti o Contigo,” which she uploaded to digital platforms, though it has since been taken down. “I remember I was falling asleep and a melody came to me, so I got up and went to the bathroom so I wouldn’t wake anyone up. What inspired me was that I was dating this guy, and we had broken up, so I started pouring it all out,” she says. “Then my heart was broken, and that’s when you start writing — because, you know, everyone needs therapy.”
But Schell didn’t know people in her circle who could actually make a living from music, so she considered a more conventional university education necessary to “move forward.”
It was her father who advised her not to leave and to try her luck in music — “‘Try what you’ve always loved,’ he told me, ‘give it two years’” — because his own parents hadn’t encouraged him to pursue his dreams. “My dad played music, did sports, he was great at everything, and my grandfather would say: ‘No, you’re going to study this.’ So with me, he did the complete opposite.”
Her first break came in 2024 with Fuerza Regida after a brief trip to Miami, where she went with a demo of her songs and the idea of finding someone in the industry she’d heard about but “only knew his name was Ben,” Schell says. There, she managed to have two or three songwriting sessions a day with different colleagues, and her name reached the ears of Nir Seroussi of Interscope, who contacted her to learn more about her work. “At that moment, I didn’t know who Nir was. I told him: ‘Yeah, sure, let’s meet.’ But I had no idea what I was walking into.”
Upon meeting Seroussi, Schell says he immediately made her feel “like family,” and after listening to a couple of her songs, introduced her to Ben Tischker of Wide Eyed Entertainment — the very same “Ben” she had originally been looking for — who is now her manager. “It was incredible!” Schell says. “Then Nir helped me place a couple of songs, including my first one, ‘PXTXS,’ for Fuerza Regida.
Originally written as a bolero, “PXTXS” — part of Fuerza’s album Dolido Pero No Arrepentido — is a heartbreak song about trying to overcome a breakup through excess and self-destruction. “It was a song that got a lot of attention at the time because it was a bolero that wasn’t vulgar but very raw,” says Schell. “I remember they replicated what I was doing with my voice on a guitar, and then they made it more regional. It turned out very beautiful.”
Through Interscope, the hit “Gabriela” by KATSEYE also came about. “It was quite strange because it happened very fast. They needed me to write a bridge in Spanish, and I remember sending Nir two options. He said, ‘This one,’ sent it, and that was it,” she recalls. “Normally songs take much longer to come out, but two months later the song was released and I started receiving tons of messages: ‘Congrats, congrats.’ I didn’t even know KATSEYE was such a big group. And well, obviously it came out, and with everything that happened with the song, I’m very grateful to be part of it.”
Since then, she mentions Rawayana’s “Bendito” (“It was super fun to write, a blast”) and Kany García’s “A La Niña Que Fui” (“It was very beautiful how we connected”) among her favorite collaborations.
In her August cover story interview with Billboard Español, García praised Schell as a “super-talented” songwriter while recounting how this song, now competing for a Latin Grammy, came to be. (Its songwriting credits also include Rafa Arcaute, Nate Campany and Richi López).
“I called her to write. I had melodies in my head, but nothing concrete… And she said to me — because it wasn’t me, it was her: ‘Hey, how about writing a song to your inner child?’” García recalled. “It gave me chills, because she didn’t know that the project was heading in that direction. And I told myself: ‘How beautiful it is that sometimes, as a songwriter, I think I have to do it all myself, that everything has to come from my head. But when you sit with creative people who are seeing the picture from outside, they see things that you don’t.”
“Just meeting her, and how I grasped what she wanted without her telling me,” says Schell, “sometimes there’s this energy in the room that’s the most important, where the most magical songs come from, and I feel like we walked in and captured it right away.”
Although she has released some music as a singer in the past year — mostly collaborations with Sistek, Gonza Silva and LAGOS — Schell, currently signed to MPub and Wide Eyed Publishing, says her “calling” has always been “writing for others” and that she doesn’t plan to have a career as a performer.
“From the moment we met Sara, we recognized an exceptional talent in her,” Daniela Méndez Varón, head of A&R at MPub, tells Billboard. “Her artistic sensitivity, versatility and vision as a songwriter set her apart, but it’s her human qualities that make her even more special.”
As for how she found out about her Latin Grammy nominations, the songwriter recalls going to bed exhausted after a long day’s work and not even setting her alarm to catch the announcement. “But obviously, I was nervous,” she says. “I left my phone’s sound on, and I got a call from producer Héctor Mazzarri, who’s one of my best friends — also nominated this year, by the way — telling me: ‘Congratulations.’ And I’m like: ‘What happened?’ ‘Songwriter of the Year.’ I was like: ‘Oh my God.’”
Meanwhile, her dad couldn’t be prouder: “He’s so happy. I mean, of course he could believe it. So he’s like: ‘I knew it from the beginning.’ It’s very sweet.”
When asked who she’d like to write songs with, Schell doesn’t hesitate. “Franco De Vita. You know, being from Venezuela, I grew up listening to him, and it was the music I listened to most with my grandparents,” she says with a smile.
