I was undecided about what class to take during the middle period at music camp this year. I ended up in Bob Franke’s songwriting class. When I decided to start writing songs again, after more than a decade without doing it, I first enrolled in one of his songwriting workshops, because I knew it would get me writing. And it did. The first two songs I wrote (Sarah’s Song and Moved Out) in this new stage of my music career I wrote as assignments in his classes. I didn’t need the prod this time around – I’ve written many songs on my own – and I’ve also drunk (and enjoyed!) the meter Kool-aid that is his stock in trade. So I didn’t need this class. But I also knew that I would enjoy it and that it would be useful. If the minimum that happens during a week at music camp is you start and finish a completely new song, that’s not a bad week’s work. In particular, I’ve been working so hard at recording (and at writing books, for my other career; finished one in August) that I hadn’t yet written the first post-CD song, and I knew that could be a psychological hurdle. Bob’s songwriting classes produce miracles. I’ve always been a fan of his songwriting – he’s written some of the most beautiful, inspiring, and (sometimes) flat-out odd songs I know. And I’ve also recently come to appreciate his performance abilities – he can take a room full of people (as he did at the Dave Carter tribute concert) who don’t know his music, and get them to pay rapt attention to songs they’ve never heard before. But it is his songwriting classes and workshops where his genius shines, and I’ve done enough of them now (this was the fourth) that I can start to figure out why they work so well. He spends the first day giving a lecture (http://www.bobfranke.com/songwrit.htm) about why you might want to write songs and, more importantly, the psychological, cultural, and musical tools useful for writing songs. And then he interviews each student in the class, asking “what kind of song do you admire but can’t imagine yourself writing?” and, based on that discussion, gives an assignment for a song you are supposed to draft by the second day of the class or workshop. His assignments are brilliant. They come at something orthogonally, so that it’s not quite so scary. They make use of what you say, but point it in an unexpected direction. The assignment that produced Sarah’s Song came when I said that Dave Carter was my favorite songwriter, and that I hadn’t written songs in more than a decade and just wanted to find a way to start writing again. The assignment was to write a “response” to Dave’s Cowboy Singer song. This time around I knew precisely what I wanted to ask for. Although many of my songs have political elements to them (in, I hope, a subtle and sophisticated way), I’ve never managed to write an environmental song, which is the area in which I spend my academic life. It isn’t surprising that I haven’t been able to. First, there are lots of really bad environmental songs, and I was determined not to write one in that category. Second, it’s one of those situations where knowing too much is a hindrance. I write and teach about the reasons environmental problems happen (and one of my complaints about bad environmental songs is that the get details wrong, or have unrealistic expectations of the politics). It’s hard to figure out how to write a song that’s compelling but also true to detail and context. I gave Patty Larkin’s song “Metal Drums” as an example of an environmental song that really works for me. Bob asked me what issues I’d been working on lately and I talked about just finishing a book on fisheries, and that, of course, the big issue of the day was climate change, but that’s really hard to focus a song around. So he gave me the assignment to write a song about a Louisiana shrimper. And, you know what? I did. (It’s actually about three generations of Louisana shrimpers.) And I like the song a lot. Here’s the other part of Bob’s genius: the most important part of songwriting is re-writing. (And more re-writing. And still more re-writing.) One of the other classes I took was Kate Campbell’s advanced songwriting class, in which we each brought a song in for critique. I brought one that didn’t make the cut for the second CD because there was something that didn’t quite work about it (and I did get some useful feedback). But in both that class, and other songwriting workshop-type things I’ve done, the big problem is that people bring songs they’re too attached to. They’ve lived with this song for months or years, performed it out, etc.; they don’t want to fundamentally change it. In Bob’s class we do real critique, and real rewriting, because you can’t be too attached to any part of a song that you wrote less than 24 hours before. And as you get to see everyone else’s songs get better and better, you understand what the re-writing process can and should be like. My first version set out the plot (it’s a long song, moving through three generations of shrimpers, dealing with three different environmental problems for fisheries) but was short on specifics, and the first set of revising suggestions I got were to put in more detail, more local color; make the people more real. Later suggestions worked with phrasing. I’m good with meter – I was from the beginning, from a lifetime of living with songs – but working with Bob over the past few years has made me even more attuned to it. That’s one of the things he really works with newer songwriters on, and it’s miraculous to see what happens to their songs as they really get the meter right. (One of his phrases is “meter trumps grammar.”) I think the biggest noticeable problem novice songwriters have is not quite getting meter; if you’re really good you can break the rules intentionally on rare occasions, but only if you know them cold to begin with. The other thing that’s great about the class is the community it creates. We’re all going through an intense experience together (even if you’re an experienced songwriter, writing a song on an assigned topic from scratch in less than 24 hours, especially while taking two other classes and going to concerts and jams is a lot of work), and putting ourselves out on the line. We support each other, turn to each other for advice and feedback, and really get to know each other. Some of my favorite songwriting friends I met in Bob’s classes. And his classes produce some truly great songs, as people are willing to put themselves into their songs, and then work on making all the mechanics work to support the song’s intention. This time around my songwriting soulmate was Emily Rose Cole (who was in both Kate’s and Bob’s classes with me); I loved her songs and she loved mine, and we had the same general instincts in responding to other people’s songs. At the end of the week Emily suggested that we try writing together, something I never would have considered before. But we made a stab at it and have the beginnings of two promising songs, which we’re now going to work on long-distance. And I am extremely glad that I decided to take Bob’s class this year!