Songwriting Festival 2010 – a word of thanks

Dear songwriters,

Thanks to all (staff, volunteers, tutors, guest tutors, musicians, and songwriters) who contributed to the UK Songwriting Festival 2010. An amazing week and some top-notch writing. For those people I didn’t get to thank face to face during our busy final concert – you know who you are, and you know how essential your contribution was.

See the video below for a few comments from our songwriting community. Keep an eye on this site for updates about our next festival and other events.

All the best to our ever-growing International community, and thanks again for a wonderful festival and some inspiring & moving songs.

Joe

“Our father, wi ‘chart in ‘eaven…”

Today we began by looking at writing efficient chord charts. This is a mundane but essential part of the SWF because the band needs to be able to understand the structure of each new song quickly in order to create the best arrangement we can for each songwriter. (I explained a bit of the background to the house band system last year in the blog). We then moved into a brief discussion of one of my personal favourite songwriting styles, the AABA jazz standard, and played/discussed a few examples, followed by a detailed lecture from Davey about imagery, tension and metaphor in a lyric. The house band started rehearsing at about 3pm, which gives us time to learn the 15 or so new songs we needed to play in the evening session.

This year we have more songwriters than ever before, and a pleasing variety of nationalities, instruments and influences (USA, Germany, Norway, Spain and UK). Tonight’s live session included performances on viola and Loopstation, Autoharp,  saxophone, 12-string guitar, as well as the standard guitar/bass/drums/keyboards provided by the house band and the songwriters themselves. Personally I always try to find an excuse to use my E-Bow and one of our (surprisingly numerous) Norwegian songwriters gave me that opportunity with a Bjork-influenced extended atonal intro. Tonight we heard and played a huge spectrum of styles/genres, including Motown, rock, country, folk, jazz and gospel. And every song we played tonight was written by one of our songwriters in the last 24 hours.

That’s a very beautiful thing.

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.

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).

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.

House band sessions

We’re two gigs in to the week now, and the house band members (Chris, Josh and me) are deep in rehearsal. The band system works like this; a songwriter completes their song (usually the same day), writes a chord sheet (or gets one of the tutors to write it), then brings this notation to our estimable ‘chord tsars’ Jo and Barry for checking. When the chart is complete, the songwriter brings it to the band in the main rehearsal room for a quick run-through. We then add ‘secondary hooks’ (intros, additional riffs etc) and, where necessary, backing vocals. Instrumentation varies (I’m still trying to find a way to use my pink Flying V ukelele) but is usually guitars/bass/drums and sometimes keyboard. We usually only have 10-15 minutes to learn and run through each song, so it’s essential that the chord charts are correct – hence all the checking and tutor support earlier in the day.

Not all of our songwriters need to use the band – some play as acoustic-only (or even unaccompanied voice), and others perform to drum-loop backing tracks created earlier in the day with our Garageband/Logic Mac workstations. But whatever the arrangement, the quality of the writing has been excellent – affecting melodies, clear and singable lyrics, and in many cases some particularly strong choruses. We’ve had a good variety of genres – punk, reggae, pop, electro and rock, as well as plenty of folk/acoustic singer-songwriter performances.

The purpose of the band is to provide a level playing field so that all the new songs can have the same performance ‘frame’, regardless of the performing experience or instrumental skill of the writer. Previous SWF-ers, or regular visitors to this site and its forum, will know that we try to separate songwriting and performance. It’s a shame that, to many audiences, a poor song performed well can sound better than a great song performed badly, so we try to give each song its best chance to ‘survive’ its first day of life!

In other news, we’ll be on the BBC today – radio this morning, and BBC West TV this evening. I imagine these news features will be online via iPlayer for a week or so from the date of the this blog entry.

Songwriting in the dock: Satriani vs. Coldplay case

I’m sure lots of our community will remember the recent Satriani/Coldplay case

Read more

Midge Ure on songwriting – and a Scottish songwriting competition

Here’s a video of Midge Ure (SWF special guest 2006) on songwriting, with some useful comments on clichÈ in his own first attempts at songwriting – hopefully this should give heart to some of our new writers!

Read more

Will Hodgkinson article

Some lovely quotes here. The only assertion I’d disagree with is ‘songwriting can’t be taught’, of course

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jan/28/music-perfect-pop-song-pulp

“A pop song does, however, follow certain rules. It is generally around three to four minutes, has a verse and a chorus, and uses a bed of chords to support a melody, with words that convey some sort of sentiment that an audience can relate to.”

Although the ‘magic’ element is certainly true – it’s a beautiful thing, as Jarvis acknowledges;

“The beauty of songwriting is that any human being can do it,” he says. “And they learned how to do it their way. One minute someone was sitting in the living room, having a cup of coffee. The next they picked up the guitar and wrote something from nothing. That’s a miraculous event. That’s what keeps me going”.

I suppose that’s the point of the songwriting teaching at SWF – the tutors only really guide people around the technique – starting by covering (or occasionally stretching!) the above-mentioned ‘rules’, and then helping the writer to tackle the bad habits – melodic rat-runs, rhyme traps, lack of imagery, over-abstraction, verboseness etc. But what is remarkable – and rather beautiful – is that however much guidance a writer gets from the tutor, the song is still authentically the writer’s own. It’s that personal quality that everyone brings to their songs, regardless of musical skill or songwriting experience.

Some of our writers have expressed to us a fear that if they work with a tutor – or collaborator – any editing or trimming will somehow kill the authenticity of the song, making it less ‘real’ or ‘true’ because the ideas have been trimmed, edited or adapted along the way. But this fear always seems to evaporate when the song is completed. It’s connected, I’m sure, with that natural protectiveness that all writers have of their first idea – the assumption that it must be the best one simply because it arrived first. Perhaps this is because when we hear a well-written song it gives us the impression, as listeners, that it ‘comes from the heart’ regardless of how many hours the writer spent painstakingly crafting every last syllable. That emotional immediacy (of great songs) is an intoxicating trap for us as songwriters, because it can lure us into feeling that we should apply it to the creative process. Or maybe we should?!!!

There’s a really simple maxim that Andy always says when he’s teaching the MA Songwriting – the more songs you write, the easier it gets…

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