There was a song school (this year called a “Songwriter Academy”) associated with the festival I went to this past weekend where I played in the performing songwriter contest. Since I had to fly all the way out to Utah for the contest it was great to have the opportunity to participate in the school for the day and a half beforehand. There were four instructors who ran three (or sometimes four) concurrent sessions, as well as three song critique sessions. More about the critiques in a different blog post. The instructors were Ellis, Kate MacLeod, and Kort McCumber and James Moors (who are a sometimes duo and did some teaching as a duo). For the first session I chose Ellis’ “Intentional Performing.” For the second I started out in Kate’s “Arranging Your Song Musically” (that she was presenting with last year’s winner Peter Danzig), but left that one early when it became clear that most of the arranging was for multiple instruments or voices, when I play mostly solo; I instead joined Ellis’ workshop on “The Time and Tools of a Songwriter.” (I would have gone to James Moors’ Lyric-Writing workshop, which was the one that was originally competing in my mind with Kate’s, but they’d gone off to some location that wasn’t easily findable.) For the third session I chose Kate’s “Melody” workshop. One thing Kate did in her melody workshop that was really cool (although it was almost the entirety of the workshop and so we did less overall than I would have hoped) was ask if anyone had a copy of lyrics to hand over to her (I did and so volunteered first). She then wrote two completely different melodies to the lyrics to show how you can make different melody choices and how they influence the feel of the song. She talked a little bit about how she made the melody choices, and it was a cool way to demonstrate the interplay of melody and lyrics. The brief bit of the arranging workshop I went to before it started focusing on multi-instrument arranging involved Peter Danzig (last year’s song contest winner) demonstrating a song he’d arranged, using different techniques so that it kept the audience’s interest throughout. It was masterfully done, featuring a riff, and variations on that riff later, and fingerpicking and strumming and hitting his guitar . . . and, most importantly, it all sounded incredibly natural when he did it. One of the big lessons I learned from the whole festival experience was that one especially important area to put my singer-songwriter energies to would be to musically arrange my songs in a more sophisticated way. I’m not sure how, exactly, to do that, but I have a general idea of what I’m aiming for even if I don’t know how to get there. Ellis is a fantastic teacher. Incredibly well-organized, inspiring, useful. My experience as a teacher makes me really appreciate folks in a teaching context who have actually planned what they are going to communicate and how (and why); simply being a good musician or songwriter does not necessarily mean that you will teach well. And Ellis was great – which is one of the reasons I joined her session in progress when I realized that Kate’s arranging one wasn’t that useful for me. The workshop-and-a-half with her featured a lot of good advice. The thing she said that the rest of us in that workshop were repeating (sometimes as a code, even) the rest of the weekend was that if you’re scared, heart-pounding, etc. before or during a performance you should reframe that for yourself as excitement. She also talked a lot about the importance of professionalism and planning and to think of a show as a journey you’re taking the audience on. Which means you need to plan your set list to accommodate that (including variation in types of feels of songs you do at different point in the process), and do a variety of things that make your audience feel comfortable that you’re sufficiently in control of the process that they can relax and come along with you for the ride. (and now that I think about it, the way she ran her workshops demonstrated that.) Most importantly, she talked about having a mission statement (and in both workshop sessions gave us some materials to use to discover what our mission statement is). Although related to the kinds of stuff I did in the KYST workshops with Laura Cortese and Shannon Heaton, this was less about creating an actual (public) tagline than about the message you tell yourself about why you’re doing what you do – and one big way to combat nerves before a show is to remind yourself of why you’re there (“to open hearts” is what Ellis uses for hers) so that your performance isn’t about impressing anyone, but about accomplishing your mission. This mission statement than spills over into the other things you do with your music career, because what you do should have a consistency to it. It’s why Ellis says she’s moved to publicity materials that show her laughing (something she does a lot on stage) rather than artsy serious shots. You want all of your materials to accurately represent to your audience who you are and what you do – why do people come hear you play? In the extra half workshop I went to there was a lot about how to organize your time as a singer-songwriter to get things done (by scheduling them in, and giving them different priority ranks, and breaking up big tasks into manageable bits). She also talked about using everything around you as songwriting material (seeing what the world gives you) and thus the importance of allowing yourself time for daydreaming and wandering, because those things can actually be really productive for a songwriter. She also played one of her newest songs (currently called “The Crow Song”) that was inspired by something she saw while watching her daughter splash around in puddles. It’s an amazing song – my favorite of hers, I think. The one session that involved all students and instructors simultaneously was on media and marketing. It ended up focusing, not surprisingly, on social media. Most of the instructors were not fans, but did point out that you work with the tools of the time you’re in. But all agreed that it is far less useful to spend your time mastering facebook or twitter than actually writing songs and practicing to be able to present them well.