Thoughts from this year’s SWF2010 Songwriting demo panel, with our very special guest Eddi Reader.

The demo panel 2009 - Boo Hewerdine, Andy West, Iain Archer, Chris Difford, Joe Bennett

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.

Collaboration task complete!

The house band accompanies one of our songwriters.

Rocking out in the cafÈ...

Andy finalises a new song prior to a playback tutorial

One of the SWF producers (Neil Martin) finishes a songwriter's mix on Pro Tools.

Recording vocals in the studio

Midge is patron of the Burnsong organisation, and will be working as a mentor on the Burnsong project (along with SWF’s own Joe Bennett) in November 2009. You can read more about this (and hear some of the songs) in Joe’s Burnsong 2007 blog.

Burnsong have announced entries for their 2009 songwriting competition, which closes on 21st August (the last day of SWF 2009, coincidentally).