When Amy Allen took guitar lessons as a teenager, she didn’t just learn songs to play.

She wrote them.

“She kept writing these songs that were pretty darn good, but I was trying to get her guitar playing to improve. I wasn’t teaching voice,” said Carter Logan, of the Maine band Jerks of Grass and Allen’s guitar teacher when she was in her teens. “Her talent was already evident. For her senior project she recorded her songs.”

Musicians and others who knew Allen when she was growing up in Greater Portland are not surprised she’s forged a successful career in music. It’s the level of her success that amazes people.

Allen, who grew up in Windham and graduated from Waynflete School in Portland in 2010, has become one of the most in-demand songwriters in the music business, helping write hits for current pop starts like Sabrina Carpenter, Selena Gomez, Olivia Rodrigo, Harry Styles and many others. At Sunday’s Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, she’s nominated for the songwriter of the year award. She’s already won that Grammy once, last year, and has been nominated three of the four years the award has been in existence.

“It’s almost impossible to get to the level she’s at. It’s a combination of being super talented and working really hard,” said Charlie Gaylord, a Kennebunk-based music producer who worked with Allen early in her career.

The Grammy Awards will be given out Sunday, beginning with the Grammy Awards Premiere Ceremony at 3:30 p.m. on live.Grammy.com and continuing at 8 p.m. on CBS. Last year Allen’s award was given out during the online presentations, when the majority of Grammys are awarded. Though Allen has been working in Los Angeles since about 2017, she talks often about growing up in Maine and finding her passion for music here.

“The child in me that was starting writing songs when I was little in Maine on my bed is screaming and crying and laughing at the absurdity of this moment,” said Allen during her acceptance speech for the songwriter Grammy in February 2025.

After her win last year, Allen emailed the Press Herald about her experience. She went to the Grammys with her parents and her two sisters, and though she did not remember hearing her name called, she remembers her sisters screaming. She hugged her family and her manager before accepting the award.

 “It was really important for me to have my family there because, in a way, I almost feel like they deserve the award more than I do,” Allen wrote in an email to the Press Herald after the 2025 Grammy Awards. “They’ve been the ones listening to my songs since I was 9 years old and cheering me on even when the songs were objectively bad.”

The Songwriter of the Year Grammy is given out based on a songwriter’s body of work in a given year. So when Allen won last year, her nomination was based on songs she co-wrote, sometimes with other writers and the artist, for Carpenter, Leon Bridges, Rodrigo, Justin Timberlake and others.

As part of her body of work for this year’s nomination, Allen was listed as a co-writer on all of the song’s on Carpenter’s hit album, “Man’s Best Friend.” Her nomination also included songs she wrote that were performed by Jessie Murph, Tate McRae, Jon Bellion, Shaboozy and Sierra Ferrell, among others. 

Allen could also win two more Grammys for songs she worked on, which will be awarded during the CBS prime-time telecast Sunday. “APT.” by ROSE´ and Bruno Mars and “Manchild” by Carpenter were nominated for song of the year, while “Man’s Best Friend” by Carpenter was nominated for album of the year. In both those categories, the songwriter also wins a Grammy if the song or album wins. 

Allen’s schedule was packed prior to this year’s Grammy Awards and she was not available to talk to the Press Herald, her manager said.

But after her Grammy win last year, Allen told the Press Herald about how important Mainers had been in her musical journey, including Logan, who not only gave her guitar lessons but allowed her to open for his band, Jerks of Grass, at local bars. She has also listed Gaylord and Jonathan Wyman, a Maine-based music producer and mixer who produced her first album, as people who helped her along the way.

Wyman said it did not take any convincing for him to agree to produce Allen’s first recordings, while she was still in high school. He said that in his 30 years of working with musicians from all over, Allen is one of a only a handful of people just starting out who Wyman was sure was destined for big things. Ray LaMontagne, who began his career in Portland clubs about 25 ago before becoming a Grammy Award-winning singer, was one of the other ones, Wyman said.

“She was able to turn a phrase both lyrically and melodically, and to be able to do that at 17 years old is not incredibly common,” said Wyman. But Allen’s success probably also has something to do with her intelligence and her ability to adapt in the rapidly changing music business, Wyman said. “She’s really smart and knows how to put herself in good situations.”

Allen grew up in Windham, listening to all kinds of music. When she was about 10, her older sister, Ashley, was the drummer in a band at Waynflete called No U Turn. Allen wanted to join, and she kind of wanted to play drums, but since her sister had that job, she took up bass and joined the band. It was in that band that she first started writing songs.

She graduated from Waynflete in Portland in 2010 and went to Boston College to study nursing, but the pull of music was too strong. She enrolled a couple years later in Berklee Music School in Boston and started a band, Amy and the Engine.

After college, Allen moved to New York and started to pursue songwriting and publishing. A year and a half later, she was in Los Angeles, building her reputation among pop hitmakers. By 2019, she had co-written the Selena Gomez hit “Back to You” and the Halsey hit “Without Me.” The latter song reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 pop chart.

At Berklee, Allen studied songwriting and wrote songs that were “unusually emotional,” said Bonnie Hayes, who was director of the songwriting master’s program when Allen attended. Hayes said Allen wrote, and continues to write, with the confidence of an accomplished artist. She’s not trying to follow the standard “pop song algorythm,” Hayes said.

“She’s such an artist, in her bones, that’s she’s comfortable doing that. And her lyrics are relaxed and funny, like talking to your best friend,” said Hayes. “In those songs with Sabrina Carpenter, it’s just the chicks ranking on the men.”

Besides having a full schedule of writing session for pop stars these days, she also still writes and records her own music. In September of 2024 she released a solo album, “Amy Allen,” featuring 12 songs written and performed by her over the last several years.

Allen wrote on Instagram that she’d “been wanting to write this collection of songs” since she started playing guitar at the age of 9.

“To anyone who’s listened to my songs in the past or is maybe listening now — I hope these songs make u feel seen/happy/devastated or really just any kind of emotion, and thank u for giving me a stream lol xx.”