What makes the Rocky Mountain Song School different from other music camps I’ve gone to is its focus on songwriting – pretty much everyone there identifies as a songwriter (and many of them are extremely good at it). I figured I’d spend my week there focusing predominantly on songwriting. But when I headed off to classes, I listened to the inner voice that was telling me where to go, and it kept directing me to some of the other types of electives. In a way it makes sense; although there are always things to learn and improve (and I definitely have more things to report about that learning from the week), I’m actually pretty comfortable with my songwriting at the moment. So what can be most helpful to me right now is working on the varying sets of tools to help deliver my songs most effectively. One set of electives I chose was Amy Speace’s performance class. It meets for three days sequentially, but I skipped the first day, since I figured (and she agreed) that I’d more or less experienced the first day of the workshop during her NERFA presentation this past fall. The whole set of sessions fit into her broader – derived from acting – approach to how to most effectively present songs. The starting message is to separate the job of songwriter and performer – by the time you’re performing, you’ve finished that first job, and your task is to approach the song anew, almost as though you weren’t the one who wrote it. She wants (and this was some of the Day 1 stuff that I worked with her on at NERFA, though it also came back on Day 3) the performer to ask three questions of the song. The first set of questions: Who am I? The songwriter shouldn’t just be a disinterested narrator, or there is no emotional reason to be conveying the song. Related, what is my relationship to the song/character? I don’t know if this is the way Amy would put it (I’m going from notes and memory), but when she worked with a few performers it was about both figuring out who the narrator of the song as its written is (e.g. Meg workshopped a song from the perspective of the virgin Mary), but also – and more important – what is there in my life that makes me feel the way the person who is narrating the song feels? When Amy’s working with people on this aspect, she actually asks them to name specific instances in which they felt the same way the actual song narrator would be feeling. In other words, Meg doesn’t have the actual experience of being the mother of the Christian savior, but she does have the experience in her life of people not understanding how she feels and what she needs, which is what Mary, the narrator, was feeling in the song. The second question is: Who am I (the performer) talking to when singing this song? And the third is: What am I trying to do (with the characters, the song)? The same approach as above is relevant here – if Mary in the song is talking to people who don’t understand how she feels and she wants to convey to them that she’s only human and has human needs and emotions, the actual performer should think of people to whom she might want to convey that same sentiment. Amy had the people she worked with actually identify who those people were; she then picked audience members to represent them (and occasionally gave instructions to those audience members about how to act when the song was being sung to them). The broader idea is that when presenting a song you want to take your audience on a journey – more about that in a minute – and that in order to convey the relevant emotions you need to be able to access them yourself. So find people in the audience who can stand in for people to whom you might want to convey the kind of sentiment the song is trying to convey, and actually think them and those situations and sing to those people when performing the song. Watching, and feeling, the difference between how people sang their songs initially and after Amy queried them and focused their attention on what they were conveying to whom was enough to convince me of the power of that approach. One of the comments she made was about the importance of separating the songwriter from the performance. All the angst and sentiment (or whatever) that went into writing the song brought the songwriter to a particular emotional space, but if you don’t step back you’re likely to start, in presenting that song, from the end place, the feeling that the song eventually gets to. But the song is a journey, so you shouldn’t start with the feeling you get at the destination – in fact, the whole joy is taking that journey, from how it feels at the beginning to how it feels at the end. So she cautioned us against throwing all the emotion of the song into the beginning – and the entirety – of the song. The most useful illustration of that for me came during the festival when I watched Ariana Gillis perform. I hadn’t seen her before and was excited to hear her – she’s a young Canadian performer who has been drawing a lot of attention. But I left partway through her set; every song seemed so thoroughly infused with angst from the very first note that I missed precisely that journey that Amy reminded us that the best-performed songs can take us on. Because the idea is to figure out how to best convey the song, Amy also advises keeping phrasing conversational, and determining whether an instrumental introduction actually serves the song (with the idea that frequently it doesn’t). The same thing is true about banter – you don’t want to tell the story of the song (“this is a song about . . . “), but rather – if relevant, and not always – tell a story that will illuminate the song. I’ll write separately about the activity we did on Day 2, which was about deciding who we are as performers and, in particular, how we present ourselves to people who don’t know us. That day was a revelation worthy of its own blog post, so stay tuned. And there are so many other specific suggestions (about setlists and pacing) that are too numerous to convey. Amy really is a master at all these factors, and it was a joy to watch her festival set after she’d explained to us what choices she makes and why in presenting songs. My take-home lesson from all of this is that if the goal is to move the audience, the song is a journey to take them on, and figuring out how to direct that journey is key. Learning how to do that well is a journey that I’ll be on for awhile.