Here’s what my Thursday at song school (the last day of song school before the festival) looked like this year. It was a particularly wonderful day, but it’s also representative of what it’s like to be at song school. I started the morning with coffee at the Stone Cup, the local café with great coffee and the best internet around (both internet and cell coverage are extremely intermittent in the area); I’ve been starting my day at the Stone Cup all week, and usually run into and hang out with other song schoolers doing the same thing. Then I walked to Planet Bluegrass (the site where the song school happens), running into and then walking with Amy Speace on the way. I was actually going to meet with Amy, but she was running late for the person she was meeting before me, so I knew I’d have time to grab some tea and fruit that they put out in the morning first. The meeting with Amy was an unofficial mentoring session. I’d worked with her in her performance class on the first day on my song “I Remember,” and she’d said we should go deeper in working on how to present it. Since I decided to play it for my slot on the open stage, I though I’d take her up on her offer. Working with her in that mentoring session was groundbreaking. She first had me play the whole song through. Then we talked about big picture things: mostly, that I was “oversinging,” rather than presenting it conversationally. We went through the song and figured out which words needed to be emphasized or swallowed to better convey the meaning. Perhaps the most useful of these suggestions was to de-emphasize the “I” in “I remember” (stress the “remember” rather than the “I” the first two times it appears in the chorus), and then fully emphasize the “I” the third time. Which makes conceptual sense in the song – the first two times in each chorus it’s specific details the narrator is remembering, and the third time it’s the big picture existential remembering (of the process leading up to internment). She also made some really useful suggestions about places to speak the lyrics instead of singing (most radically speaking the first two lines of the song before I started playing and singing) and to change what I was doing with the guitar to emphasize a particularly important line. And we also talk about if and how to introduce the song – we ended up deciding that I would talk, very briefly, about the photo I saw that inspired the song (without saying that it inspired the song, which would become clear). It was all so useful, and at various interstices of the day I worked through playing the song in these new ways, because they were pretty big changes. Then we had the first class session, and I went to a class called “How to Get High,” which was a vocal class taught by Clare McLeod (who teaches at Berklee, it turns out). Obviously the title was a funny Colorado drug reference, but the class was about extending your range. And it was fantastic. I love being taught by good teachers. It really was about the mechanics of how our voices work, and training us to be able to feel the different things that are true vocal chords, false vocal chords, larynx, and tongue are doing, and how to manipulate them in ways to get the kinds of notes and sounds of notes we want. It will take a lot of working through my notes to make much of what she did in class, but that’s because we covered so much that I can’t possible remember and implement it all at once. I left that class a little early for my official mentoring session with Justin Roth, a great guitar player. (We all get to sign up for one mentoring session for the week, and I kept not being there at the very beginning of mentoring signups, so I hadn’t previously seen an available slot I was interested in taking.) Last year I started out in one of Justin’s fingerpicking guitar classes but found it too basic so I left and went to something else, so I asked him to basically show me some more advanced techniques of the sorts of things he was working on in that class. It was only 20 minutes, but we used it really productively, working with a couple of my songs as quick models for different left and right hand things you can do to make the guitar playing a bit more interesting. It was then lunchtime, and I saw a couple friends of mine over under one of the tents, playing songs-in-progress, so I joined them (and at the lunch I’d brought along) while we gave feedback on a couple songs that were just in the process of being written. And then went off to practice my own song I’d been working on with Amy. In the first class session after lunch I decided to go to Robby Hecht’s class on “Saying a Lot with a Little.” Which was pretty low key, but basically involved him playing a bunch of songs, by him and by others, and having us talk through the bits where a lot of meaning was being conveyed by only a couple words. For some reason this class really worked for me, even though a similar class (on metaphor) taught by someone else earlier in the week didn’t so much. Some of might be where I was emotionally by that point in the week, but Robby also did a really good job of talking about how and why he made the choices he did (and he’d even brought the notes from when he was writing the songs of his we talked about), and that was interesting. It also started to rain during that class, which influenced my choice of the next class – I picked one the next tent over, on “exploring the possible.” It was a music business class with Val Denn and Mary Gauthier. Some bits of it were helpful (probably the most important thing for me to remember was how important it is to be useful rather than a hindrance in any way if you want to be an opening act) and others less so, though hearing the long and involved story of how Mary chose her most recent publicist was entertaining. Hearing Mary talk at length about anything is entertaining. It was then time for the final community sing of song school. I was a little late for it since the rain had changed the temperature and I needed to change into warmer clothing. Normally the community sing would have been led by Ysaye Barnwell (formerly of Sweet Honey in the Rock), but she couldn’t be there this year (though she was skyped in!). So it wasn’t quite as amazing at it would have been, but it ended with “down in the river to pray” and “wade in the water,” sung as we went down the St. Vrain river and into it. I grabbed the time before dinner to have a quick rehearsal (re-figuring of the song, given its new approach) with the person who was singing harmony with me (the first friend I made at song school last year), and then went to the community meal. At each of the cookouts they provide amazing beer, but the first night I was too jet-lagged and the Thursday night I was aware that I was going to have to perform, so I only had a sip or two of others’. I did at one point end up sitting next to Edie Carey (who co-taught the writer’s block class I liked so much) and we had a great conversation, discovering that we’d basically switched places, since I grew up in Chicago and now live in the Boston area, and she grew up in the Boston area and now lives in Chicago. So we have lots of similar points of reference. It was then time for the open stage. It’s a lottery to get to play (and which night and when in the lineup you get to play), and not everyone who wanted to this year got a slot. So I was twice lucky – I got to play, and I got what is apparently a coveted spot, on the last night of Song School. I was towards the end. And my performance went really well. I was less nervous than I’d been in any similar situation, and I don’t know why, but it was a fantastic feeling. I was working hard, trying to remember how I was now singing this song. But I also had fun, and, although I played it a bit faster than I wanted to, I could tell I was singing it well. And everyone listened. And commented on the song (rather than just my voice) afterwards. At the very end of the open stage, we cleared away the chairs and had a “three song dance party” (though it was actually for four songs). Which was quite a lot of fun. It’s been a really long time since I’ve danced. And the final piece of the evening was that I found a song circle in the campgrounds with some of the people I’m closest to at song school (and a few people I – and even they – didn’t know, who joined us). It was a wonderfully low-key song circle, in which we just took turns playing our own songs, with others listening and throwing in tasteful harmony or guitar licks as useful. I got to bed later than I usually do, but the song circle was a fantastic end to an excellent day, and an absolutely wonderful song school.