Imagine you’ve spent the past 20 years writing about songs but never had the chops to write one. This is my penance: sitting in a room in north Wales, with a tiny keyboard and notebook spidery with attempted lyrics, the only rhythm in my ears my rave-energy heartbeat, the only melody in my mind the lilting panic of my inner critic going: “Argh!”
It’s the final day of a four-day songwriting course at Literature Wales’s 16th-century HQ, Tŷ Newydd Writing Centre, led by Brian Briggs of folk band Stornoway and Welsh poet and songwriter Paul Henry. Tonight, I have to perform an original song with two relative strangers, in front of people I didn’t know four days earlier. This particular terror is the climax of a bigger endeavour on my part: to explore the growing popularity of songwriting courses, and to find out if they work.
These courses are everywhere in 2024. Spotify has recently teamed up with BBC Maestro, which offers recorded online songwriting lessons with Gary Barlow and music production tutorials with Mark Ronson. US platform MasterClass has Alicia Keys, St Vincent and John Legend on its glamorous roster. Real-time contact is available too, with Big Thief’s Adrienne Lenker recently running a Zoom course with US institution School of Song, while in the UK, creative writing centres such as Moniack Mhor and Arvon have critically acclaimed musicians such as Boo Hewerdine and Kathryn Williams running songwriting retreats.
These courses are booming “because lockdown gave people time to reflect,” reckons Williams, whose new album, Willson Williams, made with Dan Willson (AKA Withered Hand) stems from a friendship that has involved them teaching together. Since Covid, “people have been finding ways to retreat,” Williams adds, “and songwriting feels accessible, revealing of ourselves or a way of working out past situations. It can be stepping into another character or seeing something from another perspective.”
But where does a newcomer begin? Williams recommends Jeff Tweedy’s book How to Write One Song, full of warm-hearted guidance. I try some online classes, and find St Vincent calms my nerves, a bit. “Push through the feelings of: I’m worthless, this sucks, I’m a fraud,” she tells me, sentiments I recognise. “That’s half the battle of writing.” Gary Barlow encourages me to listen to lyricists I love, so I mainline Leonard Cohen, Amy Winehouse and CMAT, hoping their genius seeps into me.
I also listen to the most popular singer-songwriter in the world in a fan-compiled YouTube video of her top tips. “I think as a songwriter there is that urge to connect,” Taylor Swift says. “To say: ‘This is how I feel sometimes’, and have fans say: ‘Oh my God, I feel that way sometimes too.’” She reminds me of the human dimension behind the common urge, in all these different people, to write songs.
As I procrastinate at home, I realise a retreat, a space to write with like-minded people – which Williams also recommended – might propel me along. But does it matter if I don’t have a clue what I’m doing? I ask Williams this, and her answer is reassuring: “Being a beginner, and being OK with that, is the best way to be creative.”
***
Located high above the sea on the Llŷn peninsula, Ty Newydd is an inspirational setting, though it starts to feel a bit inauspicious when I learn that David Lloyd George died in the library where we meet for evening sessions. The course is about links between poetry and songwriting, and my classmates include people who have published poetry collections, played on folk-rock albums, and regularly perform humorous songs (one entertains us in a showcase on the final night with a song about haemorrhoid cream).
We start every morning with Briggs teaching us a cappella songs, which exercise our lungs, our ears and my nerves. We go on communal rainy walks, where we’re encouraged to write freely, without filter, about how we’re inspired by the sounds of wind, weather and water, to put together unusual combinations of words that speak to us.
We also eat together, constructing an intimate creative community, and in sessions, we have fascinating discussions about what songs do that poems don’t. Henry talks about how great melodies elevate cliche and abstraction, while poetry has to deal with the “harsh terrain” of the page. He also says that one sound in a song – such as Clare Torry’s vocal from Pink Floyd’s The Great Gig in the Sky – can articulate emotionally what “a whole poem by John Donne could do”. I think of the thrilling chord at the start of the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, and how it still ignites my heart.
With Briggs, we analyse snippets of music by different artists (such as Bruce Springsteen, Nina Simone and, deliciously, Kylie Minogue) and talk about how songs are intricate jigsaw puzzles of words, sounds, atmospheres and arrangements. “People often feel a pressure to put intense emotion into a song to give it power,” Briggs says, but advises that subtler musical punctuation often works better, like a little fingerpicking (the subtle majesty of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car), or the suggestion of a drone (tons of folk songs) to give tension.
My song starts to emerge from a free-writing session where we’re given lines of poems as prompts. One leaps out at me – “My father and mother, my brother and sister” – suggesting something gothic. Why would someone list their family like that? The idea of a murder ballad starts to trickle on to the page, as we’re told to look for moods and energies in our words, and not to worry whether we’re copying anyone.
I find out later that the line comes from a Paul Muldoon poem, Sightseers, about a family trip. The poem ends with a detail about the horrors of the Troubles, but the song I write is very different. And as we go off to write, Briggs offers the most unnerving comment of the week: “Whatever you do, your song will always end up sounding like you.”
***
This takes us to the final day: me in the library with a keyboard. We’ve been encouraged to collaborate, which makes me feel weirdly vulnerable. Thankfully, my classmate Ellen happens to write excellent poetry and helps me out. We twist Muldoon’s line into a rhyme – “my father and mother, my sister, brother”, repeating it as a refrain sung by different voices, like an echo of a folk song.
The idea of a ghostly girl wandering around a house emerges. Ellen and I work on a narrative with a twist at the end, mixing ordinary lines (“I open the door”) with ghostlier ones (“I fall through the floor”). After my keyboard skills fail me, an emergency call is placed to Ellen’s husband, Josh, a fellow course participant, who helps me out on the guitar.
Our song is titled (The Rather Rough-and-Ready Ballad of) Georgina, as a nod to the late David Lloyd George. It sounds like Lankum, Josh says, and later I notice how my melody and singing are heavily influenced by (and highly inferior to, plus less in tune than) the Irish band’s singer, Radie Peat, and how its lyrics are inspired by a conversation with another classmate about Penelope Farmer’s Cure-inspiring 1969 novel, Charlotte Sometimes. Its chanted refrain also carries echoes of our morning a cappellas with Briggs. My subconscious has been doing its work after all.
When we come to perform it, I’m terrified, but also strangely excited. As our group has built a shared sense of trust and loyalty, it feels OK that what we’ve made is pretty rough and ready. I also realise that these courses aren’t about writing hit singles, but the joy of trying out new things with new people.
And thanks to Ellen and Josh, the song’s debut isn’t a total disaster. Afterwards, I approach my tutors for a review; they are unsparing but kind. Henry says that he would have loved me to play around with first- and third-person perspectives in the song, and maybe even speak the last verse to vary its tension. Briggs points out that my layering of lines on top of each other makes the refrain “hard to understand”, and suggests some development with its chords and arrangement to “stop its dirginess, getting too, well, dirge-y”.
Then comes my best review to date: “I loved its intensity. Personally, I’d love to hear your song as drone-y heavy metal.” Not a direction I thought I’d be encouraged to pursue at 45, but watch this space. I ask Briggs what it’s like to criticise a critic. “It’s never easy to read reviews,” he says. “But I try not to let them influence what I’m doing next. Not everyone will like what I do. You should listen to that advice too!”
I think of what I might say about my song as a critic. I’d say that its repetition was a little leaden, and the mood was clearly derivative. But from now on, I’ll also think about how people don’t necessarily write songs to fit into trends, or around reviewers’ assessments. There’s a thrill and sweetness in the act of writing songs, and what that can provide in people’s lives: a new, urgent rhythm, and a fresh voice.
Listen to Jude’s song (The Rather Rough-and-Ready Ballad of) Georgina, and read her lyrics
My father and mother
My sister and brother
All under the cover
Of darkness are gone
I stand by the window
I wait on the stairs
I sit at the table
There’s nobody there
My father and mother
My sister and brother
All under the cover
Of darkness are gone
I listen for breathing
I open the door
I find it so empty
I fall through the floor
My father and mother
My sister and brother
All under the cover
Of darkness are gone
I crouch on the landing
I rock on the chair
I died in the water
I live in the air
My father and mother
My sister and brother
All under the cover
Of darkness are gone
You said you were leaving
Before the day came
I long for your voices
To call out my name
My father and mother
My sister and brother
All under the cover
Of darkness – I’m gone
