Two brothers, songwriting side by side

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

House band session

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.

Two brothers, songwriting side by side

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.

Another great day at the songwriting 'office'

Hi to all you SWF2010 blog watchers. So we come to the end of the (very busy but fun packed) second day. It’s great to see so many people so easily mixing from so many and varied social spheres, continents, musical genres and ages and life experiences/perspectives. It is truly astonishing to believe that the majority of the attendees were complete strangers less than 48 hours ago.

The morning lectures were truly inspirational, from how to construct correct and reliable chord sheets (very useful for the house band rehearsals), to analysing and reflecting upon what inspires us to write a song. Whether that be the introduction of jeopardy or metaphor or (the songwriter’s true friend) the use of imagery into the narrative arc of the lyric.

Tonight is the second ‘open mic’ session; the standard of the songs on the initial Monday nights session was truly impressive. So who knows how much further the quality bar will be raised in tonight’s session.

During the course of the week we will be posting clips of sessions, so you too can be equally impressed by the standard of this year’s attendees.

Mark

A bit of a revelatory morning for me at SWF…

Taking my seat in the University Theatre to the strains of Girls Aloud (SWF truly embraces a broad range of genres). The topics for today included deconstructing hits. While this sounded interesting – I had no idea it was about to sort out a particular songwriting problem that has been plaguing me for months.

Joe's Lecture on Songwriting Structure

Part of the talk centered on AABA songs, which have fairly strict conventions about title placement, bar lengths, even how long the song itself song is. We were given a live demonstration of several Jazz standards including the song ‘Making Whoopee’ written in 1928 and ‘Yesterday’ by the Beatles. While the form is more often used in older songs, it still pops up in contemporary hits like Nora Jones’ ‘Don’t Know Why I Didn’t Come’.

This got me thinking about a particular “problem child” song of mine. You know the ones – you feel in your bones you have really good idea, but you just can’t seem to make the song flow. Because I had positioned my title at the end of each verse and chorus, I wondered if what I’d been thinking of as a Verse/Chorus song could in reality be an AABA song. After the talk, I sat down to have a go at reworking the structure. By cutting one chorus, adjusting the lyric and repositioning the instrumental break, the song sounds so much better as an AABA. RESULT!  For the first time, the song seems to be fully working and I really, really like it.

Heidi

Airing a new song near the Castle end of the University campus

Today’s introductory blog is a collective effort from Rachel, Mark, Heidi and Matt – the SWF volunteers. It’s our job to keep up a running commentary on all the exciting things that are already happening – and to generally help out wherever we can. From today we’ll be walking about campus, armed with cameras, laptops and vast quantities of sheer brazen noisiness. The three of us have been attending the Masters Degree course in Songwriting at BSU this year, so it was great to see so many of our “tribe” in one place!

Sunday night at Burdall’s Yard in Bath gave the songwriters a chance to make introductions – and also to hear some fantastic songs from the tutors. It was wonderful to see so many songwriters all in the same place! Andy White finished off the evening and your friendly bloggers were impressed not only with his songs, but also with his stomp box. We all want one.

After breakfast on Monday everyone trouped into the theatre for a really insightful introductory talk from Joe Bennett on the nature of songwriting – and what to expect from this week. He reminded us that this week is all about supporting songwriters of all styles and types… songwriters of all ranges of experience from the beginner to the more experienced songwriters.

Joe paused for a moment to give everyone a chance to get a little better acquainted by finding out a bit more about each other. The questions included; “Who’s your favourite songwriter? What’s your favourite song? How would you describe your songs? At this point, the buzz in the room rose to a bit of a roar. This seemed an audible sign of just how passionate everyone is about music and songwriting.

It was amazing to learn that 270 songs will be written this week – though as yet, none of us yet know what these will sound like. It sounds like it’s going to be an intensive week, but also be great fun. We were warned that sleep might become a highly prized commodity – because everyone will be so immersed in writing songs and learning new skills.  Joe also asked us to keep in mind that, “a good songwriter is a good song re-writer. The first idea may not be the best, so stay open minded that we are always rewriting until the song cannot be made any better.”

Two of our favourite moments of the morning were (1) when one of the songwriters asked if there would be a bar to oil the wheels for the evening performances? Joe replied, with a sigh, “In our experience, we’ve found that songwriters prefer herbal tea and mineral water.” Which was met by horrified gasps – until everyone realised Joe was just indulging in a mass leg-pull. Then, (2) when everyone was calling out their suggestions for song titles… we were particularly taken by ‘From the Word Go’,  ‘Slamming Doors’ and the intriguing ‘Mini Bongo’.

Outdoor rehearsal at the SWF café.

During the day, while the songwriters got to grips with meeting the tutors in their groups and sharing songs for the first time, we volunteers have been out and about. Our day has consisted of filming the first day and conducting interviews with the small clusters of collaborators, songwriters and tutors – and lone songwritings wherever we found them all over the beautiful BSU grounds. There were people sitting under trees or lying on the lawns with their guitars (and laptops!). Imagine our delight when we came upon two songwriters with a three-quarters finished rendition of the evolving ‘Mini Bongo’. Excellent song, too!

So here we are in the little office (our home from home for the week), pooling our experiences and pulling all of the images and notes we’ve collected through the day. All of the participating songwriters seem to have had a wonderful, creative and insightful day. The feedback from everyone is how much they are enjoying the feedback from the tutors. The words “insightful”, “approachable”, “supportive” – and “hilarious” have all been used.

Camouflaged songwriter!

Coming across the songwriters today in the act of making songs, we can’t help but be impressed with the talent we’ve seen so far…and just how lovely and friendly everyone is. One of the songwriters told us Newton Park campus must be the most creative place on earth this week. She reckons it will glow in the dark. We can’t wait to hear what emerges over the week. The first taste of everyone’s music will come this evening!

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.

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.

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

Final Performance night - all the songs were written during SWF week.

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.

SWF 2009 - Finale song - What's the Big Idea?

SWF's Joe and Richard 'trading licks' with the songwriters.

SWF studio producer Abner performs a song from his homeland of Ecuador, while Joe accompanies on, er, ukelele.

Sunday Times writer (and songwriter) David Sinclair with SWF tutor Richard Parfitt.

Final rehearsals with the house band - a lovely reggae tune called 'Where Do I Go', written two hours earlier!