I’ve been to a couple previous Peter Mulvey songwriting workshops, and signed on for another one this past weekend because I love hearing Peter talk about songwriting. Or, really, almost anything – he’s one of the most interesting people around. And he’s one of my current favorite songwriters. In his workshops he first takes a couple of his songs and unpacks them, talking about how they came to be written or what he thinks works about them. Along the way he makes broader points about songwriting. The two songs he started with might be one that I’ve seen him talk about before, but his comments (and approach) were nevertheless new. They were (both unreleased at this point, so I’m not sure what the titles are) If You Shoot at a King You Must Kill Him (which came from a songwriting challenge) and I Already Know (which I think of as the “dolphin with a head cold” song – it’s probably my favorite of his newish songs). In the case of the first song he talked about how everything came from the first two lines of the song “Every night I have the same dream . . . “ and then “Mercedes in a ditch” and then he just followed where that led – that one of the tricks in songwriting is listening to what you already have and think about what follows from that or makes sense next. He also talked, in this context, about the importance of a song having a punchline (which was interesting, because on the way in to the workshop I was listening to Prairie Home Companion and the poet Billy Collins was also talking about his poems having punchlines.) In both these cases they were talking about the payoff to the song/poem, but also the idea that it may take you in a direction you weren’t expecting. In the second song he talked about the importance of the way the lyrics sound (and allowing some things to be driven by that), something that will probably warrant a blog post of its own, because I’ve been thinking about that issue in songwriting. He also said that if he has one thing that is his approach to songwriting, it’s starting with a verse that’s extremely specific and detailed, and then, in the next verse, pulling out to get a much bigger view of whatever it was that was going on in the first verse. (And, then, often, zooming back in afterwards to the level of detail you started with.) He also talked about how, rather than censoring yourself if you write a line that sounds too sincere, maudlin, over-the-top you can temper it by where you go next with the lyric – to make it a bit more absurd, so that the song is taking itself less seriously. The one other general point he started with was an admonition to “let the clay be wet” – to always be willing to change your song. “If it’s never quite done, it can get better.” And he demonstrated lots of little changes you can always make when playing it. He then turned to listening to songs from workshop attendees and giving feedback on each. I was even more impressed with this aspect of the workshop than I’d been in previous ones. First, he met each song where it was, letting people know what he thought worked well in the song. And then he provided specific suggestions (or approaches) that were doable and unquestionably would make the song better. That model (positive feedback, plus suggestions) is pretty standard, but it was how carefully he listened and got inside the songs that made it really work. He’d hear a song with a complicated guitar part and say “you know what works so well about that guitar arrangement is that it’s in Lydian mode” [and then he’d take a brief detour to explain to everyone what that meant and what was cool about it]. And then suggest that it was pretty hard to play that arrangement in standard tuning, so put his guitar into an open tuning, play back (almost note for note) what the person had just played in a way that was much easier to play in that new tuning. Or at the end of the song he’d say “well, there are really six sections of the song” (and lay out what each one was and what it was doing) and I think you can accomplish what you’re trying to do in four or five sections, so one way to deal with that would be take what is verse 3 and sing it with a different melody over what is now the instrumental bridge” (and then, likely as not, demonstrate what he means). And he could come up with simple fixes to what seemed to be difficult problems – for the guy whose song was all vague generalities and images he talked about the importance of getting specific in the verses (which is going to be hard for someone who just isn’t there at all), but then said that one way to do that more easily would be to put it in the first person present rather than the third person past – which made the vague images suddenly contextually more specific, and made it easier to demonstrate what types of specific images you’d include. It was all extremely impressive and a joy to watch. I wasn’t sure I was going to play anything – it seemed clear that we wouldn’t have time to get through songs from everyone, and I have plenty of opportunities for feedback on my songs. So I deferred to other people for whom the idea of playing a song for Peter Mulvey was a much bigger deal than it was for me. But he decided that the three of us who hadn’t gone by the time the workshop was scheduled to end should get a chance to get a critique too, if people were willing to hang around. So the song that I decided to play was “Lay Me Down Easy.” He talked about how much he liked the anachronisms of the song – that on the one hand, it’s a song of the 18th century Enlightenment, and also a perfect 1960s era folk song, and yet also about quantum physics concepts we wouldn’t have known about until the last decade or so, and that it’s great to have all those things thrown together. He asked (because we didn’t have much time) if there was something that was bugging me about it, and I said that I didn’t really have any small issues with it; it was really a question of whether it worked in the big picture, and, in particular, whether it was too self-indulgent. He immediately responded that if that was my concern, the fix was easy – I needed to run the beginning of the third verse through Marcus Aurelius and turn the emphasis around. (That verse starts “and all I’ve accomplished will linger as long as they still speak my name.”) The idea to take from him is that, in fact, it WILL all end: what I am will only live on when people are still speaking my name; there will come a time when I won’t be remembered, and that’s the point of it all. (As he put it, “no more salve; more vinegar.”) Which is a pretty cool suggestion, and one that shouldn’t be that hard to implement. So, I’ll take that, along with general inspiration about songwriting, and incredible respect for Peter’s musical (and polymath) abilities, and call it an afternoon well spent.