Tomorrow I head off for a week of music camp – Summer Acoustic Music Week (or SAMW, to those in the know) – in New Hampshire. I’ll take three classes, participate in jam sessions and workshops, hear concerts and perform, and not sleep very much. This will be my fifth time there. I’m not quite sure how I hadn’t managed to discover SAMW earlier. I’d been to music camps before (those are stories for another blog post) and I listened to WUMB, the radio station that runs that camp. I’m not even sure how I did come to know of it the year I first attended, or what made me decide to go. But it’s been a transformative experience each year I’ve been there. And each year, although I’ve taken three classes, participated in multiple workshops, etc, has really turned out to have one focus. The first year was about mandolin. I had just bought on and hadn’t yet played it at all. I don’t even really remember what my other two classes were, because I pretty much played mandolin all day and night. I had a knack for it, and it was a lot of fun. The other big thing of the first year was performing. About halfway through the week it became clear that there was a big student concert on the last night and that pretty much everyone participated. It hadn’t occurred to me that being at camp would have anything to do with performing, and I hadn’t sung into a microphone in more than a decade. But I decided to step up to the plate, dusted off one of the few songs I’d written that I still remembered (Fiddle Player, which in a slightly revised version, will be on the new CD), and played it in the ooncert. Backed by John Kirk, mando and fiddle instructor, who also calls dances – because the song is about a filddle player who calls dances. Playing in that concert was a huge step (although I didn’t know it at the time) in my starting to play publicly. The second year was about songwriting. I’d been scared to take Bob Franke’s songwriting class the first year (and, actually, songwriting wasn’t really on my mind; it was something I used to do). In his class you get an assignment (each person has an individual assignment, based on the conversation you have with Bob) on the first day and you have to come back the second day with the draft of a song. I promised myself that if I didn’t do songwriting with Bob the first year, I’d find a way to do it after camp, and so I’d taken a two-day workshop with him through the Passim School of Music, in which I wrote my first song in 15 years – Sarah’s Song, which is on my first CD. (My assignment for that one was to write a response to Dave Carter’s Cowboy Singer.) Having witnessed the magic of his songwriting class in short form (and still not sure I had more than one good song in me), I decided to do the longer version at camp my second year. And in that class I wrote Moved Out. (The assignment for that one – the night before I’d awoken with the phrase “moved out, moved up, moved on” running through my head, but couldn’t figure out how to write such a song without making it a cheesy country song. So Bob told me to make it happen.) The revelation from that year was feedback – he creates this amazing community of songwriters in class, and some of my closest musical friends I met through that process. It’s a lot of fun – and can be quite intense – to workshop each others songs, and the best of those experiences happen outside of class time. The third year was the year of No Toll in Canaan. I’d written it before camp – just before camp, in fact, and was pretty pleased with it. That was the year that I played it for Maura Kennedy, because I wanted her to back me on it in the student concert. And she LOVED it. That evening, mid-week, she kept calling people over saying “you’ve got to hear this song,” and the whole rest of the week I was playing it for people who had heard from someone that it was a great song. Only a few weeks after camp was the weekend of festivals – Strawberry Park and then Boston Folk Festival – during which Pete and Maura invited me up onto the mainstage to sing the song in front of thousands of people. That was definitely the turning point in my decision to try to be a performer. My fourth year at camp was the year of song arranging. Accidentally. I had intended to take “guitar for songwriters” with Brooks Williams but so had everyone else at camp – the class had more than 50 people in it. And it just didn’t seem like it would be a good experience. So I left that class and literally just wandered until I came across a smaller one – it was taught Cliff Eberhardt. I don’t even know what the official name of the class was; possibly songwriting. It was really about song arranging. How to use different types of chords to make your song work better. How to make sure that the chorus sounds different from the verse. How to play an instrumental introduction. How to vary your strumming and picking to accent those differences and to underscore what the song is trying to do. I am so grateful that I happened across that class. It changed the way I thought about arranging (and even writing) my songs; it introduced me to new ways of thinking I didn’t even know were available. Some of the songs on the new CD were modified under Cliff’s influence, including the chorus to the Chicken Song and the arrangements to If I’d Known. I also wrote the intro (and continuing) riff to Fun Will Find a Way as part of an assignment for that class, and the existence of riffs elsewhere in my songwriting/arranging since then can be credited to Cliff. Last year was supposed to be about voice, although I suppose one never really knows in advance what the focus of the year will be. I was excited about working with Siobhan Quinn, the one voice instructor they’ve had a SAMW who didn’t rub me the wrong way. But my father ended up in the hospital a week before camp, and I couldn’t go. So that brings us to this year. I don’t know what it will be like – I don’t even know for sure what classes I’ll be taking. I’m pretty sure I’ll take the Kennedys’ performance class, and probably Kate Campbell’s advanced songwriting class (although I’ve heard it doesn’t – unlike Bob’s – involve any actual songwriting). The other class session is where I’m undecided. Voice, which I really need to take, is being taught by Sloan Wainwright, but I am concerned that my personality might not work will with hers. Pete and Maura are doing harmony, which is also something I’d really like to work on. But in recent years their harmony class has been much more of a “let’s put on a show” preparation for a big production number in the student concert, and, although those are fun, that wouldn’t get me what I need from a harmony class. (Which is too bad, because they’re among the best actual teachers there.) One fallback option is to take Bob’s songwriting class again. Although I’ve done it before (twice at SAMW and the first time at Passim) and it’s unlikely to teach me any new ways to look at things, the one thing about that class is you come out of it with a song. And going into the week knowing I’ll have a new – and probably good – song coming out of it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Who knows; I’m not sure I could have predicted the significant effects in advance from previous years, so I’ll just see what this year brings.