Peter Mulvey is one of my absolute favorite musicians: his songwriting is weird and wonderful, his playing is glorious, and he’s such a good (while understated) performer that I would see him performing just about anything. So when he did a kickstarter campaign for his new album I wanted to support it, and more than just a nominal amount. And since one of the premiums for support was a private consultation on guitar or songwriting, I donated in a way that resulted in that premium. Since he’s in town for Redbird shows (with Jeffrey Foucault, Kris Delmhorst, and Goody Goodrich) this week, we got together today for that consultation. It was fascinating and useful. I’d planned ahead by choosing some of my songs that I thought had promise but that weren’t quite working in one way or another, to see if he could help me either decide to ditch them or figure out what to do to make them work better. That’s a tough call for songwriting feedback from musicians you really like: on the one hand, you want to impress them with your best songs. But your best songs aren’t the ones you either need or want feedback on (because you’re not likely to change them). And I’m finally at a place in my songwriting life that good feedback that I can actually use is far more important than trying to make people think that I’m great. So I was ready to actually learn. And did I ever. The first song we workshopped was “When We Fall,” one of the most unusual songs I’ve written (it starts out “Sister Mary Agnes said that I would go to hell when she saw me kissing Michael as they rang the recess bell”). He confirmed, as had come up in my song critique group, that the story was a bit opaque – he, as some others had, mis-interpreted some of the story in the second verse. So we talked about how to make that clearer without messing with the basic structure of the song. (There is a similar bit that could be done in the third verse to clarify as well.) What was more interesting, though – because all of those things were things I could have figured out myself – were his comments about rhythmic and chord structure. He pointed out that my rhythmic structure was a bit weird – with two extra beats in each line. And that I should use that structure less often to make it actually signal something. So we talked about how to keep it once in each verse (rather than four times). And then we also talked about how to vary the chord structure so that in the chorus I don’t get to the tonic until the end of the chorus. (We also talked about the possibility of changing the third – of four – melody line in the chorus so that it doesn’t exactly mirror the first. First choice would be to keep the melody the same but change the chords underneath it; second choice would be to change both.) The second song we worked on is one tentatively called “Unravel.” I wrote this one initially many years ago, have three verses I like a lot, and have not been able to figure out how to end it. (It starts “I am the one who unravels your dreams,” then goes onto “I am the one who gives chase to your heart” (2nd verse) and “I am the one who entangles your thoughts” (3rd verse).) First we unpacked some details about the first three verses and he had a few really perceptive word tweaks to suggest. Some of those served (intentionally) to make the narrator even stranger than it seemed from the beginning (and another involved tying the second verse better into the first and third). He then suggested that, instead of resolving the song in the final verse (clearly explaining who the narrator is – that was the problem with all the versions I’d tried; they were too over-the-top explain-y) I simply reassemble a verse with the first lines from each of the first three verses. Which I do think could work – at minimum, it’ll work way better than anything else I’ve had so far. We also talked, for this song and any other with more than three verses, about putting in an instrumental/vocal bridge (singing "oo" or something like that). For this song, given the weirdness of the narrator, it could also add to the feeling of the song. The broader underlying point was to always have movement, change, development in a song. The third song I worked with was my most recent song that I actually play out, “Darkness Falls.” I chose that one because on the one hand it’s a more finished song than the other two, but it’s still recent enough that it’s changeable. And I’m glad I worked with that one. First off, he explained what I was doing rhythmically that gives the song a lot of forward momentum in the verses, which was useful to hear about, since I hadn’t been specifically aware of it. And he suggested that I try to do that as well in the chorus (and we played around with how to do that). I had also a potential melody tweak in the verse that he thought should definitely be chosen, and we examined how to put chords under that shift so that it mirrored the motion in the earlier part of the verse (something I would never have come up with on my own). He also suggested that I only use the chorus twice – doubling up on verses before I get to the chorus. And then as we played around with the movement issue in the chorus we also – at the suggestion of my spouse – worked on taking away one musical phrase the second time it comes around, so that it does something different. Of the four songs we worked with, this is the one I’m most likely to keep (and record) and the tweaks were really useful and ones I would not have come up with on my own. The final song we worked with was “As the World Turns Round,” a story-song I wrote at the end of February Album Writing Month this year. (It’s one I started entirely from melody, which is not usually how I write.) Unlike the first song I worked with, in this one, the story was a bit too well telegraphed and ran into the danger of cliché. So we talked about which lines I can most usefully fix to make it a bit more (as he put it) “rustic.” His overall comment was that I need it to have a more discernable voice that isn’t mine (because the narrator is an a war veteran who has had difficulty returning). We toyed around with some possible ideas (including putting it into ¾ time) but the one thing he did say was that the bridge works especially well rhythmically and that if any other rhythmic shifts I came up with affected that, they weren’t worth it, since the bridge was the best part of the song. We talked a but more at the end about songwriting generally (and how often I’m doing it – he’d asked about FAWM, since songs I wrote during FAWM had that designation). And then he asked me to play him a couple songs of mine that are actually done, since the ones I’d played were the “in process, don’t know if they’re keepers” songs. Which was kind of neat. It was fun – he’s a smart person with really good musical instincts, and it was productive to hear them applied to songs of mine that I’m not yet entirely settled with. I love that he reflected some things I’d been thinking about, and introduced some that were not even on my radar. And I’m assuming that some of the bigger conceptual things are ones I can take to other songs in the future.