December | 7 things worth sharing

Welcome to How to Write Songs!

Hello, you :)

This is the very first newsletter of How to Write Songs (which is really just me, Keppie, thinking, talking, and sharing about songwriting).

I will cut to the chase in just a moment, but first want to let you know that the newsletter will be monthly-ish, and only ever contain things of genuine interest and value to me, and therefore—hopefully—you, too.

I’ll also include any links to videos, articles, workshops, and classes that I’ve released in the previous month.

With all of that out of the way, here we go!

7 Things Worth Sharing

1. UPCOMING WORKSHOPS:

   February 23—Beyond the Second Verse: Song Mapping (25 ppl max)

   March 16—Small Group Song Feedback Session (5 ppl max — these sell out fast, so please book early).

2. A chorus is more than just the bit where the lyrics repeat. But that was about all I could define a chorus as in my early days, and my chorus writing tended to be flat. The chorus is more than that: it’s the response to the problem established in the verses.

3. Quote I’m thinking about:

   Through most of history, the people who made art never thought of themselves as making art. In fact it’s quite presumable that art was being made long before the rise of consciousness, long before the pronoun “I” was ever employed. The painters of caves, quite apart from not thinking of themselves as artists, probably never thought of themselves at all. What this suggests, among other things, is that the current view equating art with “self-expression” reveals more a contemporary bias in our thinking than an underlying trait of the medium. 

   — Art and Fear, Orland and Bayles

4. I am beyond thrilled that my favourite writer, George Saunders, has his own newsletter. It has already set my mind alight.

5. Did you know that bats are actually probably primates? Their ocular nerves cross over in the brain - a trait that is only shared by humans, apes, and other primates. I am now the biggest bat fan, and was enraptured for the more than 3 hours I listened to Merlin Tuttle (world’s leading bat expert) talk about them on my current most favourite podcast, Ologies.

6. Music to listen to: Arooj Aftab, the Pakistani-born singer and songwriter now nominated for Best New Artist at the 2022 Grammy’s was…echem…one of my besties when we studied at Berklee. Her album Vulture Prince is absolutely gorgeous, and I can’t wait for the rest of the world to experience her talent, and her hard work.

7. The 3 things I did this year to write over 20 songs.

That’s it! Until the next…sleep well, eat well, write something :)