Songwriting Group #

I thought I would join a Songwriting Group where you were expected to write a new song every two weeks. Each of these challenges ran for about 8 weeks where you are given a prompt to get you started writing. At the end of each of these you would have 4 new songs, some might be good and some just so, so but the whole idea is that you were finishing songs that were no longer pieces of ideas that you had floating around. I joined this Songwriting Group for 3 rounds of songwriting prompts with a deadline. You were put into smaller groups where you would share your songs with others in your group and they would provide feedback on your song.

It all was very cool and a lot of fun and there were even a couple of songs that were an important part to my “Finding my Voice” timeline album idea. There was a prompt to write a song in the style of your favorite band, like you were pitching this song to them. Immediately I looked at bands like Chicago, Blood Sweat and Tears, Lighthouse, Tower of Power and thought to myself, why? Why did I have such a fascination to rock bands that had a brass section. It was because of my second cousin Harvey Batke. Growing up he really was my best friend and we spent lots of time together. At least once a month either his family stayed with us for the weekend or we went to Edmonton and stayed with his family.

I always wanted to include Harvey in everything that I did. When I started playing in Bands and starting Bands of my own, I wanted to include Harvey. Harvey played trumpet, trombone and basically a brass guy. It was Harvey who introduced me to Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass. That was a light bulb moment for us that we could include brass into the band. Over the years we discovered Chicago and we even went to see them when they played in Edmonton. When I started writing my own songs it was Harvey that wrote the initial brass parts that I later took over as I started writing more elaborate arrangements of my songs.

Harvey had passed away from cancer a few years earlier but I took this writing prompt a step farther and not only writing a song in the style of Chicago, I wrote the song about Harvey called “Missing Harv”. The problem was that as we were getting older we went on different paths. I wanted to do more recording, less live shows and he wanted to get his Commerce Degree. We rarely spoke after that, so Harvey never knew about the influence that he really had on me.

In another prompt you were to write a song about someone else. In some of the talks the leader of this program talked about how she got into music. Her father died when she was about 11 and music was a way to help her deal with that grief. Holy crap, did I ever identify with that as it just occurred to me that I was about that age when music changed for me from something that my parents expected me to do and practise to be my therapy tool. My younger brother who was 8 years younger than me had died. We were really close as we really developed a tight bond when Mom and Dad went to Europe for 9 weeks and left us in the care of my Aunt and Uncle. They moved their family into our house for the summer and I took care of my baby brother who was about 2 at the time. I did not know how to deal with this grief so I just poured out my emotions in the music that I wrote. It was a bit wild, percussive, had a lot of punch. This was me still dealing with the grief that I was carrying. When people would ask who all was in a particular band and my name would come up, the comment was usually oh this is probably a pretty wild band. I finally got to write the song that I have been trying to write for the past 50 years or so. The song was about my little brother and a glimpse into his character. I think we bonded well because we were of the same temperament as well. The song was called “So Soon” and asks the question, why did you go so soon.

That song really cemented the whole point of the album “Finding my Voice”. This isn’t a song that I could have teamed up with another songwriter to write (usually for the lyrics). This was a song that I absolutely had to write and even though he has been gone for many, many decades I still feel that he is my muse and sending all these song ideas to me.

One other song that I feel I should mention about this songwriting group is based around something that Mary told me one day. She tells me that she has never told anyone about this and it wasn’t like it happened it was a thought that popped in her head but she did not act on it. She was having breakfast at a favorite diner with her boyfriend and he did something that upset her. She walked out of the diner and she sees this guy sitting on the hood of his car. She was wondering what would have happened if she went up to this guy and kissed him. I told her this would be a great song. I don’t know what the prompt was but I wrote the song from the point of view (POV) of the guy on the hood of the car. It was called “That’s How It Happened” as who ever he tells the story have a hard time believing that it happened. After I finished writing this song I could see that there was a terrific concept for an EP that I would call “The Trilogy” and it would include just 3 songs each telling the story but from the POV of the girl and the boyfriend.

I quite the songwriting group, not because it wasn’t effective and got some good song ideas out of it. I also had some that I don’t think are going to go anywhere. I needed time to get my album completed and there were remixes, some extended versions I needed to write and all the vocals needed some major overhaul. I highly recommend joining a songwriting group if you really want to sink your teeth into some songwriting exercises that will produce results or at least finished songs every two weeks.