Premiere: Maggie Chapman's 'Unbreak'

Unbreak was one of those songs that woke Maggie Chapman up in the middle of the night.

"I basically pressed record on my phone," says the 16-year-old Nashville singer-songwriter, who premieres the tune at Paste BN. "I played this thing straight through; It was this rough, raw emotion in a song."

Unbreak, which appears on the six-song self-titled EP Chapman releases this week, offers a twist on the typical break-up song, coming from the perspective of the person initiating the break-up.

"I'm constantly reminded of the damage that I've done/Your memory is haunting me, no matter where I run," she sings.

"I was thinking about how there are a lot of songs about being broken up with and how hard it is to deal with heartbreak," she says. "But it's equally heartbreaking to be the heartbreaker.

"When the relationship's bad and one of you needs to end it, it's a really hard thing, even though you weren't the one that was broken up with."

When she thinks about the boy who inspired the song, Chapman remembers that "he hated coffee. And I loved coffee. So he resisted it the whole time we were together. Then, afterwards, he drank it every morning. I'm like, 'I can't undo that to you!'"

Chapman wrote her first song at age 9. "I would come home from school every day and never leave the piano," she says.

As a present for her 13th birthday, Chapman's parents purchased studio time so she could record one of her songs.

"I had a mouthful of braces, and I sat down at the piano to record my eight-minute song, and they were like, 'Okay, you're just going to need to cut that in half,'" she says. That half apparently was good enough. The people at the studio sent it to some friends in Los Angeles, who flew Chapman and her family to New York. Then her grandmother's best friends' daughter, who worked for a label in Nashville heard it and convinced Chapman and her mother to move to Nashville. There, she connected with songwriter Luke Laird, whose hits include Little Big Town's Pontoon and Hunter Hayes' Somebody's Heartbreak, and signed with his Creative Nation publishing and management company.

Laird produced Chapman's EP, which is now available for digital download.

Before she moved to Nashville, the native of Clearwater, Fla., lived next door to professional wrestler Hulk Hogan.

"I didn't really know what he was famous for, but I knew he was famous, so I would sing for him all the time," she says. "It's kind of embarrassing now."