Song Writing - Musical Chairs

Except you play the music, write the lyrics, entertain and perform.

Imagine this, an age where you can pull up the chords to any great anthem and learn the hits from your favourite band. You’d probably have the entire repertoire down in a week, ahead of all the summertime opportunities to impress your friends. 

But for our latest youth music project at Craven Arts, its phones away - exercise your mind. We’ve booked the shows, now all we have to do is present something completely original and totally collaborative. 

Last night marked the first evening of Make More Music where we we met the cohort of young musicians, tasked with this time pressured challenge. How do you teach song writing to an array of different people anyway? With some of our students only at the beginning of their journeys in sound, the challenge seemed on our shoulders. 

There to ease us all into the art of song-writing was Alex Johnson Seymour. Composer, frontman of The Tenmours and Leeds Conservatoire lecturer. 

We learnt many techniques including ostinato. A short musical phrase that you can play consistently throughout a song, and we listened to example pieces where this technique flowed to the front of the track then phased to the back. 

Alex’s simply put approach offered some much needed structure to a topic that can be interpreted in so many ways and his lecture offered us plenty inspiration, or at least, where to find it. 

When the group split off into rooms marked ‘those desperate to shred’ and ‘those desperate to write’; I started to hear the points from Alex’s lecture come to life in the early drafts of the students songs. “ In my bubble of interest, there is currently the monologue of lady Macbeth, and I want to sing about that, that’s..what I can offer this process” said one student at the writing table, which was littered with art materials, an ‘inspiration lucky dip’ and a ‘box of one liners’ for song building purposes. 

After an hour the groups swapped over in an organised scramble, so that everybody had the chance to put both melody and lyrics down, it was like musical chairs. 

A highlight for me was helping a young drummer unfold his lyric writing capabilities, he mused about a journey down a long, winding road and then of a quest to find an army of benevolent morals. From my career as a top line writer I could see instantly he had the sort of bravery it takes to dig deep then speak his mind. 

That’s what we’ll be striving for as these sessions come closer to the goal of live performances; expressing our truths, whatever that may be, a little ostinato, great team work, great listening and a lot of bravery for those moments of sharing where there are no rules and you’re just being asked to exercise the poetry of your mind. 

Make More Music is a programme run by Craven Academy of Modern Music and Craven Arts. It gives talented young musicians the opportunity to learn from experienced teachers and learn music in a group setting for free. Rosie is one of the teachers and coordinators of the programme.