Here’s a (maybe) final post from my Utah festival experience, this time about the song critiques. At the songwriter academy there were opportunities for three song critiques, by the different instructors. The students were divided into three groups and the group then rotated which instructor we were doing critiques with. On the plus side, you got to know the other folks in your group pretty well. On the downside, you didn’t really get to know the folks in other groups. My group had some cool people and some talented songwriters in it, but was the less professionally-oriented of the students on average – I was the only one of the contest finalists in my group (other groups had multiples), and there were a number of people in it who had only written one or two songs ever. That colored the sessions a bit. It can be as useful to learn from the critiques of others’ songs as your own, but that works better when the songs are starting from a pretty accomplished point and are in a similar genre to the ones you’re working on. That was true of a few of the songs in my group, but certainly not all of them. My group’s first session was with Kate MacLeod, and I chose to workshop “Half of a Song” with her. She didn’t have all that much to say. She did point out a couple of things she liked (such as the fact that the last line of each verse (which leads into the chorus) says the same thing but does it in a different way each time). Her biggest suggestion, and I see the merit in it, was that I consider rewriting the lyrics of the 2nd half of the chorus, especially the third line (“Will you still love me when daylight is fading?”) to something more of a hope and less of a direct question (“I hope you’ll still love me”) – which makes some sense given the trajectory of the song. I don’t have a clear idea of how to phrase that line (“I hope” or “hoping” aren’t engagingly-written enough), but I’m going to consider options and see what I can come up with. The second critique was with Ellis. Based on what someone who was in her first critique session had said I went into it not expecting I would get that much out of the experience and so changed my strategy about which song to present, picking “Where the Words and Music Meet.” One of the interesting things about Ellis’ critique session was that she asked us each to start out by saying two things we really loved about our songs, and then asking us to specify what we’re especially hoping for feedback on. I think the idea was that she doesn’t want to stomp on the thing we most love, which is a sweet idea . . . although I’m much more likely to want stomping if something needs to be stomped on. (But I recognize that I’m far less fragile about these things that most people there were likely to be.) She, and everyone else, found a lot to praise in the song, Interestingly, people seemed to especially like the lyrics in the last verse. She had two specific suggestions for me (neither of them about specifically what I’d asked for feedback on, which was whether the song had enough movement/build from start to finish). The first was to change the shape of the melody in what I think is the second line (or 2nd half of the first stanza, depending on how you conceptualize it), so that it goes up instead of down – opposite to what I do in the section before that. Not sure how I feel about that one. The second was to consider moving away from the internal fhyme at the beginning of the chorus (“we don’t need much, just strings to touch”) – that it called too much attention to the rhyme. What’s interesting is that that’s the one line of the whole song that I didn’t write – it came from a co-writing exercise Emily Rose Cole and I were attempting that we never did anything with, and that’s what she started with. I then took it in a different direction and wrote my own version of a song around that line. So since I didn’t really write that line you’d think I’d be less attached to it, although it was the whole genesis of the song, so it’s been there longer than any other part. That’s no reason to keep it if it’s distracting, but I’d need for there to be a better phrase to use instead. I’ll think on it. I’m not convinced it’s an issue – it’s certainly not a major issue – but the fact that it stood out to Ellis (who is a really good songwriter) does say something. My third session was with Kort McCumber and James Moors, who are a duo and did their critiques together. That was my last session of the whole song school, and I’m really sad I didn’t get to have a critique with them earlier in the process, which might have persuaded me to do a different workshop session with them – they were GREAT. By far the best at critique. The song I brought to them was Underground (Draglines and Dollar Signs). The group liked it in general, and they said it worked at telling the story it was trying to tell. Other than the suggestion to change the title (to Dig Deep Drill Down, which might just be too much alliteration even for me), their primary suggestions were about the chorus. They though that the first line was the melodic (as well as lyric – hence the suggestion to change the title) hook for the song and that they wanted to hear it again, either actually repeated or somehow echoed. (They also wanted me to double the chorus at the end.) And they thought that the chorus didn’t end as strong melodically as it started. We worked through a bit of what they meant and how to do that and the most productive suggestion was to lose the middle two lines of the chorus. Which is handy because line 4 has been a placeholder I’ve had a devil of a time trying to replace. And I think that just taking those two lines out leave a 4-line chorus that works (both melodically and in terms of what they lyrics convey) . . . I could then decide whether to repeat it or not (or just repeat it at the end). I’m pretty excited about that possibility and wouldn’t have thought of it on my own. I’m less persuaded about re-writing the melody of the last two lines, since I like the melody that I have there, but I’ve been playing around with the options in my head and we’ll see what I come up with. Oh – one more suggestion was to start the verse on Am instead of C. Which is how I had originally written it (it’s a coal mining song; they’re contractually obligated to be in Am), but Vance Gilbert had thought that the Am thing was too much of a cliché, and so suggested that even if I start the riff in Am that I actually start the verse in C before going minor. I liked that change, but I’m definitely not attached to it, and I might just want to accept the song’s identity and put it back to Am. It’ll be interesting to play around with those songs with the critiques in mind. And it’s definitely useful to get feedback from a different music community than I normally hang around with.