Eddi will be joining our songwriters’ panel, listening to new work written during the week, and performing a special one-off show for us here in Bath. Here’s her recent single ‘Dragonflies’.

Sunday Times journalist David joined us for the week

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

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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

Chris and Boo answered questions from the audience about the craft of lyric-writing (UK Songwriting Festival 2009).

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. Here’s an audio file of their answers to the audience’s questions. If anyone wants to volunteer to transcribe this and send us a text file, we’d be delighted – or add the transcript as a comment to this post.

Chris and Boo Questions (MP3, 8MB)

House band rehearsal 2008

In 2009 we were delighted to welcome back two of our 2008 tutors. Iain Archer and Boo Hewerdine (best-known for their songwriting for Snow Patrol & Eddi Reader respectively) will both be with us all week, running songwriting workshops with our core team in Bath. We were also really pleased to welcome outstanding Irish singer-songwriter Andy White, who flew all the way from Australia to join the SWF tutor team.

The studio team includes house producer Davey Ray Moor working with our usual complement of studio engineers, session musicians and arrangers. All our visitors have access to our recording facilities, and will be able to perform their new songs with the house band.

Cold Kisses (Thompson)

Here I am in your room going through your stuff

Said you’d be gone five minutes, that’s time enough

Here in your drawer there’s lacy things

Old credit cards and beads and bangles and rings

Well I think I’ve found what I’m looking for

Hidden away at the back of the drawer

Here’s the life that you led before

Old photographs of the life you led

Arm in arm with Mr X Y and Z

Old boyfriends big and small

Got to see how I measure up to them all

There is a place we all must start, love

Who were you holding in that fond embrace

I’ve found a door into your heart, love

And do you still feel the warmth of cold kisses

Here I am behind enemy lines

Looking for secrets, looking for signs

Old boyfriends big and small

Got to see how I measure up to them all

This one’s handsome, not too bright

This one’s clever with his hands alright

Tougher than me if it came to a fight

And this one’s a poet, a bit of a wet

Bit of a gypsy, a bit of a threat

I wonder if she’s got over him yet

Old passions frozen in the second

Who were you holding in that fond embrace

Hearts have a past that must be reckoned

And do you still feel the warmth of cold kisses

Time to put the past away

That’s your footstep in the street I’d say

Tie the ribbon back around it

Everything just the way I found it

And I can hear you turn the key

And my head’s buried when you see me

In a Margaret Miller mystery

And do you still feel the warmth of cold kisses

Do you still feel the warmth of cold kisses

In the 2008 Festival we were joined by songwriting legend Richard Thompson, who performed a set specially for the festival visitors, participated in workshop/playback sessions and discussed his songwriting techniques with SWF director Joe Bennett.†Here’s an excerpt of the solo acoustic set he performed, featuring the song ‘Cold Kisses’.

Reproduced by permission.

†

I occasionally get asked, by Festival songwriters, undergraduate studentsand songwriting teachers what software and hardware I use to project lyrics and play back songs for analysis during songwriting lectures. Sometimes the question actually hijacks lectures and diverts us from discussing the actual song, so I’m going to write this blog post about it, so next time someone asks, I can just send them this link and get on with talking about songwriting!
This is unapologetically nerdy and exhaustive, because the people who ask about this sort of thing often want lots of technical detail.
The hardware
During lectures I have my Mac laptop with me – it’s a standard Mac Powerbook running OSX and iTunes. This is connected to a VGA projector (see photo) and a mini-jack audio cable connects the Mac to whatever sound system we’re using (in the photo example we used a small mixing desk on the table, routed into the theatre PA system in the ceiling).
The library
My iTunes library is around 6000 MP3s that I’ve collected over the years from various sources. The computer is always live on the ‘net, so if someone in the lecture class wants to discuss a song I don’t have, I just spend the £0.79 then and there and buy it online.
Because I’m sometimes running a PowerPoint or web browser simultaneously, I like to be able to play and pause iTunes remotely in the background. Sometimes I use the Apple remote for this, but most of the time I prefer to use a background application called Synergy, which is a simple iTunes controller that provides play, pause, next track functions etc, using function keys.
Lyrics and MP3s – the background
We all know that despite many years of attempts by rights owners to prevent fans publishing song lyrics online, it’s possible to locate the lyrics to almost any song on the ‘net. But using a web browser to do this live in a lecture is inelegant, and distracts the class from the song. So I combine two techniques – MP3 lyric metatags and lyric widgets.

In 2005 I discovered Mac OSX lyrics widgets. These are small applications that run in the background using Apple’s OSX Dashboard (i.e. they work with any Mac). There are several, but they all do essentially the same thing – display lyrics attractively on screen from the iTunes lyric data. But that’s not all. If they don’t find any lyric data, they automatically search the ‘net for the lyric, and then extract the text from the lyrics sites they interrogate, and paste it into the MP3 for you. All this happens live, in the background, meaning I can download a song (legally, of course) and then have the lyric embedded in it within less than 10 seconds.

I use several widgets, running concurrently, because they all search slightly different lyric sites. I’ve found that if one widget doesn’t find the lyric, another one will, and then the first one will simply pull the data from the MP3 itself (which will have been embedded automatically by whichever widget found the lyric online first). My current ones are;

Sing That iTune, Fire, Harmonic and the defunct but easy-to-find PearLyrics.

Icing on the cake – hot corners
Mac users will know that OSX supports hot corners. So I set up the Mac so that every time I move the mouse pointer to the top left of the screen, it launches Dashboard. Having previously set things up so that the lyrics widgets are always running, this means, in a lecture, all I have to do is play an MP3, sweep the mouse to the top left of the screen, and the lyrics appear!
But there’s more…

Jewelcase

Sometimes, we have an iTunes playlist running while we’re setting up a lecture – a list of recent hits, or songs in a particular form, theme or genre. So to make this a bit more visual, I also occasionally use Jewelcase, a shareware plugin for iTunes that displays not only the lyric metatag, but also the JPG of the album cover metatag – and puts the whole thing in a beautifully rendered spinning CD jewel case. Projected 20ft high in a lecture, it is a thing to behold!

And a tiny bit more…