This afternoon I went to a “song deconstruction and reconstruction” workshop with Peter Mulvey at the Passim School of Music. Peter is one of my current favorite songwriters, and he’s also just a fascinating person – I’d pay money just to listen to him talk (on any subject) for an extended period of time. I did a workshop like this with him awhile back and while there were no real revelations, it was interesting and useful enough that when I turned out to be available I decided to do it again. Interestingly, this one was at the unusual time of 3:30 on a weekday – a time when I expected most people to be at work, but it was fuller than the previous one that took place on a weekend afternoon. It started off with Peter playing some of his songs and explaining the process of writing them. Most of the ones he did were extremely recent (as new as last week), so he was able to explain what the song started with, what came next, and why he made the choices he did. His process, as I may have written about the last time I took a workshop with him, is generally completely backwards of mine – he starts with a riff, then a melody, than a lyric, and I do it (usually) in the opposite order. But one of the songs he talked about today started with a lyric line and seems to have come about similarly to my process. Moreover, in some essential way his process is quite similar to mine, in that he lets the song reveal where it wants to go. He talked about a song idea being like a card game in which if too many cards are turned over it’s too uninteresting and if there’s only on card turned over it doesn’t give you enough constraints to be interesting, so it’s all about having the right number of cards, the right number of pieces that tells you there’s an interesting story and makes you work to figure out what it is and present it. In other words, he doesn’t go in saying “I want to write a song about growing up in an alcoholic household,” but instead writes a line that might suggest that there’s something going on in the narrator’s childhood that’s worth presenting in the song. He compared it to only seeing as far as your headlights, following where they lead, and then having the next bits illuminated as you go. Which is exactly how most of my songs work. For the second half of the workshop each participant had the chance to play a song or part of one for feedback. He specifically suggested something in progress or that we’re stuck on. And although there are song critique contexts in which I want to impress the person doing it, I’ve come to realize that Peter is never really going to recognize who I am (at least not from a context like this – he’s extremely friendly and conversational in a way that makes you feel noticed but he clearly doesn’t remember me from other similar contexts in which we’ve met). And the same was true of the other participants, who were much more novice songwriters than I am. Which freed me to actually follow the recommendation and present a fragment of something in progress that I’m stuck on. It’s what I was working on writing on Sunday. I have a great line that is what got me into the song (“I borrow trouble, try it on, and see how well it fits”) and had created two verses and a chorus around that, but didn’t like most of it except parts of the melody and the first two lines of the song. (I only sang the first verse and the melody to the chorus.) And, more importantly, I didn’t know where it should go next – at this point it stayed in those sorts of generalities, along with a way too sincere chorus lyric. Hashing through possibilities with Peter was instructive. He suggested the possibility of making the fist two verse lines (including the “borrow trouble” one) into a chorus. In part because I don’t start the verse on the tonic. We played around with that a bit, though I’m not sure I think it works. He also suggested a couple of what he called “mechanical” solutions to try out. The first is to change the subject of the song (e.g. instead of “I borrow trouble,” make it “you borrow trouble” (or he or she borrows) – that makes it into a story that needs to be discovered/told in a way that it isn’t when in the first person. The second was to completely change the rhythm (even with the same melody) – try making it a rock ‘n roll song, for instance. It can shake loose a different way of thinking about the song. I don’t know what I’ll do with the song, but it was the perfect song to workshop. His suggestions give me options to try, and they’re useful tools to keep in mind on other songs in progress.