I’m having an absolutely fabulous NERFA (Northeast Regional Folk Alliance) Conference so far this year – which is especially great, since I was sick last year and couldn’t sing (and felt awful). The best thing so far has been the performance workshop (“Sing What You Mean/Mean What You Sing”) run by Amy Speace. I came really close to not going to the workshop. It took place less than 7 hours after I went to bed, so if I’d been able to stay asleep longer in the morning I would have skipped it. And once I was up I considered choosing a different workshop (most likely on social media) in that session; I wasn’t really sure how helpful it would be to be in a performance workshop. But I decided to give it a chance – none of the many NERFA workshops I’ve been to on social media have made it a manageable concept – and I couldn’t be happier that I did. Amy is becoming kind of a big deal. Her songs are being covered by important people and she’s been opening for or touring with folks like Judy Collins, Nanci Griffith and the like. I respected her songwriting, but I didn’t realize what an extremely cool person she was overall. She gave an overview of how she thinks about making a performance feel real – both for the audience and for the artist – by finding a way to embody the song you’re presenting. She said there are a couple questions that should be answered about the song (and, more importantly, the person singing it): who are you (and possibly where are you), and who are you talking to. The three possible answers to the second question are 1) a specific person, 2) yourself (but not yourself at your current age or at the age in the song) or 3) god, broadly defined. It all seemed pretty abstract, so she said she was going to show us how it worked by working with individual people on song performance. She asked for a volunteer to go first; I volunteered, and she picked me. She worked with me for what must have been 45 minutes. I chose “I Was Here” as the song of mine to present. She had me play bits of the song repeatedly and in different ways, focusing on ways to bring out the meaning in the story by having me emphasize different words. The first two lines, for instance, are: He gets off work at midnight, take the F train back uptown He shakes off all the daily slights and times he’s been put down And she kept interrupting to ask questions designed to get me to emphasize the important parts of the story: WHEN does he get off work? (Midnight.) How many of the daily slights does he shake off? (All.) It was designed to get me to organically emphasize the words that make the story real, without just telling me to do it. (A way to get you to figure out, in any song, what to emphasize.) She then had me think about how I felt in the song – the message is that (as in the first line of the chorus) “I was here; I mattered.” So she had me think of a situation when I didn’t feel supported about that sentiment and had to try to communicate to someone about that – she picked a particular person to stand in (physically) for that role. I had to tell him the story in words, then in words with music behind it, then in words with some singing. (She also had me express frustration and hardship from my own life starting to tell the story.) Eventually she had someone stand with her back to me way down the center aisle, and had me say, then whisper, then sing the chorus to that person. That last part was the most transformative. I felt the pleading, the vulnerability, in the chorus in a way I hadn’t before. The most radical suggestion she made – and we implemented it throughout – was to put the song in the first person. She said, and the audience agreed (after they’d listened to it) that it made the song more immediate and more personal. I’m really torn on that. I can absolutely see that – I have the tendency to be an external narrator in some of my songs in a way that can keep them at more of a distance, and the kind of performance she was talking about comes from embodying your song, even if the narrator isn’t really you in your life – in fact, if the narrator isn’t, then finding something in your life to be thinking about while singing the song is the key. But the song has two different stories in the first two verses, and I think it would be weird to have two different first persons. She didn’t think so, and the audience said they though they could follow along. But I can’t see it working unless the song were radically changed (like making the person in the first two verses the same. Which might not be completely impossible. But then the third verse would also not be possible the way it is (because I couldn’t go from being in the song to being an omniscient narrator). So I have to think about how I feel about that. And I have to think about it fast, because I’m set to record a demo version of the song at the end of the month. Nevertheless, it was an absolutely amazing – and extremely useful – experience. And other people in the room seem to have thought so too. I think I got brownie points for being willing to go along with the strange things (there were more than I’ve even described here) she asked me to do, and everyone could see the transformation in the presentation of the song. Since then people have been coming up to me and talking to me about what a great job I did, or how much they like the song, or even what a great workshop in general it was. So the experience turns out to be have been useful even from a “being noticed by people at NERFA” perspective. Overall – an incredible experience.