Summer Songwriting workshops
Over the summer holidays I had the pleasure of running holiday songwriting workshops across both EMA’s Albany and Grafton campuses.
I’ve written for a number of years now and it’s always very cool to see kids around the age that I started at the exact same point I was. I always find it quite amusing seeing them initially overthinking and immediately disqualifying all of their ideas (classic songwriter move), but once encouraged to ‘just write’ it’s amazing to see how quickly some really cool songs can be written.
We did a number of exercises like the ‘stream of consciousness’ which I explained was writing whatever was in your head for 4-5 minutes or so. There’s often ‘roadblock’ moments where pencils hover over the paper, but the activity was to try to get past these.
Most songs were initiated from phrases or words the kids wrote down on their paper, resulting in Grafton’s recorded songs ‘Taylor Swift’ and ‘Hula Hoop’.
In Albany I asked the kids if they could think of their favourite place or favourite memory, which resulted in their song ‘Running Back to You’ about thinking back to someone they used to hang out with.
A natural theme of these workshops is collaboration, which is another important thing to do as a songwriter - to be able to bounce ideas off other people and challenge each other/be challenged with different/new ideas. It was very cool to see the chemistry of each group manifest itself in a slightly different way, resulting in a slightly different kind of song.
They all made music videos along with their songs which was another cool way to express themselves with their songs and a fun time.
I encouraged them all at the end of each workshop to keep writing, because the more you do something the better you get at it, which is definitely the case with songwriting.
It was a pleasure and I look forward to seeing them all knock that Ed Sheeran guy off the charts.
-Chris Bates (HOD Singing)