Beth DeSombre: Blog

The final week of lectures in the online songwriting class I’m taking (Pat Pattison, from Berklee, through Coursera) focused on a set of things that we can bring to songwriting from playing attention to how we speak. The first is what he called the “body language” of communication, which is how we actually say the words we say. How we say a word – whether there is hesitation or not in saying it – gives insight into the meaning behind what we say.

He sat in the front row, nearly in the center, focused intently on the music. He’d never seen me – or the person I was sharing the bill with – play before. I started the show with more than the usual invitation to sing along; I was quickly losing my voice and told the audience to grab any repeating line they could and join in, since I didn’t have much to contribute vocally. And from the first song, I immediately noticed that he did. At first I couldn’t tell if he was really singing – his mouth moved in the involuntary-seeming way you sometimes see with old men – but I could make out the syllables “Shackleton’s whiskey” and it was quickly clear that he was picking up on a line after the first time I’d sing it and figuring out when it would repeat.

When last we left this week’s overview of the Berklee songwriting class I’m taking, we’d gotten through sketching out rough lyrics of the three verses of a song, in the method Pat Pattison demonstrated through writing a song called “Hobo Wind.” It’s a method pretty different from how I typically write a song, although there are echoes of things I do without necessarily consciously doing them.

This week in songwriting class (online, taught by Pat Pattison of Berklee) was about writing the whole song. Until now we’ve worked on specific concepts (like rhyme or line number/length) in the lectures and assignments. This week Pat took us through the entire process of writing a song, from start to finish. He demonstrated it through the writing of a song he called “Hobo Wind.”

This past week was meter week in the online Berklee songwriting class I’m taking. This topic is simultaneously the most important and the most difficult to teach. This was not a hard week for me – as a Bob Franke acolyte, and as someone who has paid attention to language my whole life, I’m a bear for correct meter and emphasis in songs.