Next time you are on YouTube, do this.

Treat yourself to Amanda Dewell’s “Broken,” a song that mourns the loss of a good friend, and the first song she ever wrote.

That’s her on the cello, and she’s excellent.

But the lighting flash of revelation hits when she starts to sing. Because what pours out of her is a well of hurt, confusion and anguish much deeper than her years.

She was only 12 at the time.

Next month, with many more songs under her arm, and many more videos – among them several covers – to her credit, the now 17-year-old Auburn High School junior heads to Abbey Road Studios in London to record her first full album and work with some of the best producers in the world.

“I still can’t quite grasp that it’s happening, but I am excited,” Dewell said.

Taking her and other kids will be Joe Wilson, a veteran of the local music scene, long-time employee of Ted Brown Music and denizen of recording studios from here to Los Angeles, who in 2011 started a rock ‘n roll school for kids in Tacoma. He met Dewell when she was 11 and in a band that came in first place at the school that summer.

Dewell recalled what happened when she returned the next year.

“We were crunched for time. We had a final performance at the end of summer camp, and we needed a song because we hadn’t written one yet, I said, ‘I’ll write a song, give me five minutes,’ so they left me in the rehearsal space for five or 10 minutes.

“At first I didn’t know the song was about my friend. I was just kind of writing a song, then I showed the song to her. She looked at me funny, and I said, ‘Oh, my god, this is about you. I’m so sorry.”

Her band’s mentor sent the song to Wilson.

“I took her into a studio where there were studio people and recorded it,” Wilson said. “The engineer and I looked at each other, and we both said, ‘What the hell was that?’ And I hooked it up to a video and stuck it on YouTube. It ended up with 10,000 or 11,000 views in the first four or five months it was on there.

“The first time I saw her really emote something was at the very end of the first video, ‘Broken.’ The last lines, ‘So my pain will be over’ just killed me,” Wilson said.

When Wilson started the school up again the next year, he said, instead of having four girls come in who wanted to sing, there were 30, and every one of them had Dewell’s song on their phones.

Dewell described some of her musical influences.

“I really liked Paramore when I got into the rock school thing, the summer camp, and I was doing punk rap music. Then I got into Indie acoustic stuff. … I play four or five instruments mediocrely. I started playing the cello when I was 10 and in the fifth grade. More recently, I’ve gotten into guitar and ukulele. I’ve been playing those for like a year and a halfish. But I do play a mean recorder,” Dewell said.

Dewell writes – typically in her room at home – of her own experiences, but her songs are multi-faceted, touch on universal themes, say many things. And while she writes, the melody composes itself in her head.

“It’s strange mostly because I feel that I’m not even saying what I’m feeling correctly, so that’s where I think the most difficulty comes. I use it mostly as a therapeutic thing. It’s nice when you can write down what you’re feeling because it makes it easier to grasp onto something that’s not tangible. If I don’t do that, it can make me feel more stressed out or depressed,” Dewell said.

“My songs are not very specific anymore. They’re less about specific problems affecting me and more about the feeling of depression in general, for me anyway. How depression can make you feel overwhelmingly sad or just nothing. A lot of my songs are about how you can feel just nothing, and feel it so strong or the overwhelming current of everything at once.”

“It’s an interesting way of writing something,” Wilson said. “She’s not writing about little kids things, she’s actually writing adult sort of lyrics, but always about something that is affecting her at some point. I played ‘Broken’ for a guy on an airplane. He was 65 and he said, ‘This woman is writing about my life, singing about my life.’ ”

Like sharks are born to swim, Wilson said, “Amanda was born to write songs.”