Words are like cockroaches…

It’s day one of the Festival and we’re all about to meet in the University Theatre. One of the things that usually comes up in the first lecture is the broad field of ‘creativity’ as it relates to songwriting. We’ll be discussing this, but in a happy coincidence (surely an omen for a successful Festival!) I notice this morning that Charlie Brooker’s column in today’s Guardian deals with the ‘blank sheet of paper’ mentality in journalistic writing.

Here are a few quotes that caught my eye;

“When you’re consciously trying to write, the words just don’t come out. Every sentence is a creaking struggle, and staring out the window with a vague sense of desperation rapidly becomes a coping strategy. To function efficiently as a writer, 95% of your brain has to teleport off into nowhere, taking its neuroses with it, leaving the confident, playful 5% alone to operate the controls. To put it another way: words are like cockroaches; only once the lights are off do they feel free to scuttle around on the kitchen floor.”

[...]

Anyway the trick (which I routinely fail to pull off) is to teleport yourself into that productive trance-state as quickly as possible, thereby minimising procrastination and maximising output.”

For those who are interested in the study of creativity (what some psychologists call ‘flow’) take a look at the works of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.

If you’re ready…?

SWF 2010 begins tomorrow! We’re all getting very excited – we’ll have 50+ songwriters, a 4-piece house band, 10-strong studio team, a big support team and (if my calculations are correct) over 250 songs yet to be written.

This year we’re using two sites – our main Newton Park campus (right) and our exciting new nightclub venue Burdall’s Yard, where we’ll be having our launch event on Sunday 15th August and our gig and Q&A on the 19th with this week’s guest Eddi Reader, who will also be contributing to our songwriters’ demo panel on the Thursday morning.

After the launch event evening, it all kicks off proper at 10am on the 16th, with an introductory lecture, some song analysis, a playback session, then the first creative task. No hangovers, please!

You can follow us on Twitter and, if you’re a participant, you can join in using the #swf10 hashtag.

SWF 2010 – now sold out!

With 54 participants, this year’s Festival will be one of our biggest yet. We very much look forward to seeing everyone on the 15th August.

If you would like to attend next year’s Festival, please do join our email list and I’ll let you know as soon as booking opens in January.

Thanks – Lindsay

Master’s degree in Songwriting

Hi all,

We’re very excited to announce that the University’s Master’s degree in Songwriting has a new home, in the form of a purpose-built songwriters’ studio at our Corsham Court campus. The next enrolment is for September 2010 and we’re taking applications (subject to interview and songwriting portfolio) from now.

To find out more about the course visit http://www.MASongwriting.com.

You might also want to check out Pat McIntyre’s blog – he’s a student on the course (2009-10).

Booking opening soon

Booking for the 2010 festival (Aug 16-20 2010) will open in the next few days. We’ll post an announcement here as soon as e-booking is online.

SWF in the Sunday Times

We had a lovely write-up in the Sunday Times this week from journalist (and songwriter) David Sinclair, who attended the 2009 Festival.

Here’s the link; the text is also pasted below (c) Sunday Times 2009

Sunday Times article

—————–

UK Songwriting Festival at Bath Spa University

40 students at songwriting boot camp with talks from Chris Difford of Squeeze and ex-Snow Patrol’s Iain Archer as tutor

David Sinclair

Everybody has a song in their heart, or their bottom drawer, or wherever they are kept. This may explain the extraordinary cross section of people attending the sixth annual UK Songwriting Festival at Bath Spa University last month.

The 40 students included Edwin, who has put up a new song every week on his MySpace site for the past 35 weeks; Diane, who had promised herself she was going to have written and recorded a song before she reached 60; the waif-like Laura, who looked like a character from Skins and sang her Belle and Sebastian-influenced songs in a beautiful, ululating warble; Andy, an ageing punk-metal lunatic; and Sara, a superlative jazz singer with an album recently released. The tutors were the singer-songwriters Boo Hewerdine, Andy White and Iain Archer (ex-Snow Patrol) together with staff from the universityís School of Music & Performing Arts, including Lucy Ray, Andy West and Richard Parfitt (the former frontman of 60ft Dolls). Chris Difford of Squeeze showed up to give an entertaining public interview and to headline a superlative live show featuring performances by most of the tutors.

The notion that songwriting is a skill that can be knocked into shape ≠ó like singing, dancing or playing an instrument ó may strike some people as odd. A popular myth has grown up around the process, in which the songwriter is cast as a person hanging around waiting for inspiration to strike. Perhaps a melody will drift into mind in the middle of the night, or a fragment of lyric will arrive as the songwriter contemplates the world from the top of a No 49 bus.

Occasionally that is what happens, but successful songwriting is generally undertaken in a far more methodical manner. The staff songwriters who worked in the Brill Building in New York and those who supplied the Motown hit-making machine in Detroit showed up in the morning for work. They sat with their instruments and lyric books to hand, and by the end of each day they had written a song, possibly several. And that was how it was going to be at this event, as Joe Bennett, head of the music school and organiser of the festival, made abundantly clear in his introductory lecture. We were all going to write one song each and every day. These would be tried out first in group tutorials in the morning, then worked on in the afternoon and, if good enough, performed in the evening with the help of a professional house band in front of an audience of our songwriting peers. The presentation of ìback catalogueî (songs written prior to the festival) was forbidden.

While all this was going on, there would also be lectures to attend and, for the 12 students who had taken the studio option, demos to record. As we scurried backwards and forwards from rehearsal room to lecture theatre to recording studio to performance hall, struggling all the while to come up with the next new song, it soon became apparent that this was not going to be some kind of pampered retreat. What we had signed up for was songwriting boot camp.

Bennett was the sergeant major. A man of many hats ≠ó literally and metaphorically ó he is a much-published songwriter, author, academic and multi-instrumentalist with a grasp of popular music theory and practice that is mind- boggling. He drummed home the seven basic elements of good songwriting: economy, imagery, prosody (the appropriate marriage of words and music), universality, originality, repetition and, yes, repetition. He warned us of the pitfalls: clichÈ, rhyme traps, static melodies, misused chord loops, excess verbosity and lack of repetition. Above all, he emphasised the importance of locating a single, specific, clearly identified subject that your song should be about: ìAsk yourself, ëWhatís the Big Idea?íî

The first tutorial was a nervous, slightly awkward affair. In my group were Laura, Anna, Mairead and Flavio. We had vastly different musical styles, experiences and tastes, and yet within minutes of introducing ourselves we were all performing our own and critiquing each otherís songs. The novelty of the situation, not to mention the stress of presenting your work in such an intimate forum, prompted an immediate sense of empathy, and as the week went on a group camaraderie evolved.

While we learnt about the techniques of songwriting, a separate, deeper battle was being waged against the Demon of Doubt. The group, and indeed the whole community, closed ranks in an effective show of solidarity against this familiar foe. The mood was upbeat and supportive, the comments and feedback constructive. If a song was good, then well done. If it could be improved, then how? Cynicism was banished. As well as getting our hands on the necessary tools, we were given the time and permission to be successful songwriters.

The results were startling. As various hurdles were overcome and a rhythm of activity established, the standard of songwriting and presentation improved, in some cases virtually beyond recognition. Confidence soared and somehow, miraculously, new songs kept on coming. I found myself regularly waking up at 6am, with the late-morning deadline on my mind, reaching for my pen and lyric book. It turns out that songwriting, rather like journalism, is more to do with application and creative problem-solving than divine inspiration.

Among the exercises we were given to trigger our imagination was to come up with a list of promising song titles. This, it turns out, is a widely recognised way of prompting a new song, a method that was demonstrated to spectacular effect by the tutor Andy West in a ìliveî public songwriting session in the main lecture hall. Beginning with a title suggested by one of the students ≠ó Barry Shearman Brings the House Down ≠ó West set about composing a song from scratch about a man who daydreams of being a star while working as a cowboy labourer. Ninety minutes after summing up his Big Idea (Barry Shearman: great entertainer, lousy builder), West was singing a sprightly, country-tinged lament: ìDescended from a line of entertainers/Music hall, burlesque and vaudeville/Born in a trunk before the world changed/Back when there were concert halls to fill…î

On the last night, just about every≠body on the course had a song ready to sing with or without the band, and the festival ended with a celebratory and emotional show. Several people told me that it had been the best week of their lives. Earlier in the afternoon I had taken a tune and chord sequence into my tutorial group for which I had no title, let alone a lyric. I played it and started brainstorming with the tutor, Andy White. We ended up around midnight, closing that final show with a rousing performance of our new creation. Iíll play it for you sometime. Itís called Looking for the Big Idea.

uksongwritingfestival.com

Final performance

On the last day of the the 2009 Festival, we all got together in the cafÈ to play back the last of the week’s songs. Many people had delayed their live performance until this final session, due either to completing a particular song toward the end of the week, or the time taken in developing chord sheets for the house band. So the band had to learn around 20 songs in a 3-hour rehearsal – challenging, certainly, but Jo and Barry were on the case with the chord sheets, so every chart was really easy to read. I think we just about pulled it off (and in a few cases, even had time to write and rehearse some vocal harmonies). Barry’s excellent A&R-ing put the rock/dance-friendly songs towards the end of the final band set, which led to predictable – but wonderful – table-dancing etc as the evening’s beer took its toll on the audience!

SWFers past and present will, no doubt, be tired of hearing me say this, but it’s nonetheless a wonderful thing; a song can be nothing more than a title at 10am, and appear on stage with a full band performance by 9pm the same day. This is testament to the way our songwriters embrace the SWF experience – throwing themselves into the writing process, and forcing themselves to complete a song. It’s this ‘momentum’ of writing, recording and performing that helps many of the SWF songwriters to break (what they perceive to be) writers’ block. Here’s an excerpt from an email I received this morning from one of the 2009 songwriters;

“I would like to thank you so much for the experience of a lifetime. I enjoyed it so much and despite much doubt did in fact write one song a day [...]. All the staff worked incredibly hard but I was astounded by your capacity to absorb the time pressures and stress. It did not show one bit and you were like the proverbial swan paddling on the water.”

Here’s a gallery of performance images from the final day. You can also find some of these images on our Facebook group.

Chris Difford – special guest SWF2009

On the Thursday of this year’s Festival we got Chris Difford and Boo Hewerdine together for a Q&A about the craft of songwriting, particularly relating to lyrics. Read more

Fi’s blog – Andy West ñ Live Songwriting

Andy is introduced by Joe as the bravest man at SWF as he is about to write a song live with no preparation at all in front of a crowd of songwriters.

He hands round pieces of paper and asks everyone to write down prospective song titles.
The purpose of this demonstration is to share one method of songwriting with the group. Drawing from his experiences in Nashville he explains how he formulated a method drawing from what worked for others he had met.
One songwriter he worked with would write notes of whatever they thought could go on in the song at the bottom of the page to have them there when they began writing the song. Andy has found this very useful and this is the method he is employing today. He goes on to say that the first thing they would agree on was the title.
He describes how he would look at the titles and see if there was something that he could relate to in order to take some ownership of the song and put something of himself into.
He discards some titles explaining why he is doing so as he wouldnít use those words himself. He isolates some titles that he thinks would sing well whilst also thinking about potential subjects for the song. There are some titles that he likes but he feels would take more than an hour to write and some that he would really like someone else to write.

He does a vote within the group and which coincides with his own choice. The title offered is Barry Shearman Brings the House Down.
Andy says the first thing to do is ask yourself whatís behind the title. He advises being the detective arriving at the scene of the title and asks for suggestions about what the title could be about. Blain notes down all the options on the screen and the background story chosen is that of a man who comes from a long line of entertainers but has ended up as a builder who is not very good at his new job.
Andy makes the point that because of the descriptive nature of the song he would have quite undemanding music. He references ëAll Along The Watchtowerí as a song that has very rich lyrics with an undemanding backdrop.
He likes the suggestion of having a chronological story and soon has the first four lines being about the entertainer’s background.
Andy says itís important to get as many points down as possible and something that feels like a good first draft without being overly critical.

He makes the point that it saves a lot of time if you write a song with a title that you feel you can say a lot about to begin with.
More suggestions are thrown out and Andy is careful to keep it in the same voice and make sure the references are not too obscure. He uses the storyline that theyíve decided on to keep things on track.
The question is asked around whether he is deliberately not playing the guitar. Andy says he prefers to get the lyrics right in the story, and as itís a story song he wants to concentrate on the lyrics primarily.
Once heís happy with the verse Andy plays it with the melody he has had in his head and more ideas come out which Blain notes down.
Ideas are coming thick and fast and one songwriter comes up with a killer line that finishes the song off.
Itís a great experience, really good fun and a real eye opener for everyone to a different approach to songwriting.

Demo panel

Day 4 – and the first demo panel.

Our songwriters were invited to submit songs for group discussion for public critique (and many thanks to those who were brave enough to do this!). A recording of each song was played, with lyrics projected in the University Theatre. Our panel this year is Boo Hewerdine, Joe Bennett, Iain Archer, Andy West and Chris Difford.

The standard of songs was excellent, although some of the writers commented that they felt their writing has developed so much in the last few days that they could see flaws in their previous works. Best of all, the critiques were received in the spirit of the Festival – appreciating the quality of others’ work but accepting that the songs had room for development.

After the morning tea-break (in which a pleasing number of people were frantically finishing lyrics to complete the latest task) we got together two of our guest tutors, Boo Hewerdine and Chris Difford, to meet ‘Parkinson-style’ to discuss songwriting techniques and experiences. Chris famously uses the same method as Elton John & Bernie Taupin – of completing a lyric in its entirety then sending it to Glenn to add the melody and harmony. We discussed in the session whether this leads to a particular character of lyric, and it certainly seems so in Chris’ work – the songs are filled with imagery and storytelling, and perhaps most importantly always avoid clichÈs.

Meanwhile, the studio teams are working hard – we’d estimate that we’ll have around 70 recordings completed by the end of the week. In many cases, songs are completed at lunchtime, recorded in the afternoon and gigged the same evening with the house band. By day four of each year’s SWF, we generally find that songwriters are ‘in the zone’ and all are comfortably completing one song per day (well, perhaps not comfortably – but they’re completing the songs, anyway!).

Here are some quick pics from day 3, including the second evening performance session† – all the songs have been written since Monday.

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