Friday, July 20, 2007

Songwriting and Context

Well, I neglected to mention that I signed up for 3 months of SongU through Muses Muse. It's a songwriting resource site with courses to take and the ability to make pitches to the "industry" folk, as well as take some Feedback courses given by industry types. Sort of like "Date with a Demo" put on by SAC, but over the internet. Here's my SongU page, btw...

I did this last week for Pause and Wonder and just listened to the transcript of the instructor (Robin Frederick) who liked the "rawness" of the tune and greatly admired the "powerful" lyrics, though she felt it was incomplete (who is the man I'm singing about? where is the chorus?) and incorrectly named... She also reminded me that listeners are "stupid" in the sense that they don't know the CONTEXT of what I'm writing about the way I do... She spoke of an exercise where you re-jig the song to a third person point of view from a first person point of view (though that wouldn't work with this song).

Finally, she spoke of a quote from Sean Lennon along the lines of: 'Songs are myths about things that happen to us.' In other words, the song isn't a literal re-telling of what actually happened, but our skewed/subjective view of it... so go "all the way" and turn it into a "myth" that might appeal more universally...

I like that notion...

2 comments:

songer said...

Hey Lorenzo,

I was wondering did you find the Song U membership worthwhile? I won one through a song contest, but I haven't gotten around to using it yet.

Renz said...

Doug, what are you waiting for? If you have it for free, you have nothing to lose...

I'm taking some of the courses that are self-study, but I did enjoy the Feedback course and there are opportunities to pitch songs... I figure 3 months is good to see what kind of feedback I'll get on the pitches...

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