Songwriting with Carter Hunnicutt

A SONG IS BORN! SONGWRITING FROM CONCEPTION TO RECORDING

MARCH 10th, 2018, 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

If your heart beats and your lungs breathe, you already have cadence and phrasing.

If you can write a post-it note, you can put your thoughts into words. You are a song-writer! This workshop for all experience levels will get you started or move you forward in your own songwriting. We discuss what to do once you have a living, breathing song on your hands.

The class will be conducting dissections but you won’t need a lab apron. Songs will be dismantled to see how they work. We may sing, dance or bang on the table to ob-serve literary principals at work and learn just enough music theory to make us dan-gerous! You will hear songs in their native habitat and develop strategies to capture and train wild ideas (also known as verb husbandry). While many songwriters work alone, collaboration can offer new ideas, insights and support that may improve your work. Each student is requested to bring at least to share: an idea for a song, a title, a band or album name, a lyric, a melody, a poem, or a complete set of lyrics with or without music. You may wish to have a dozen copies. While you don’t need to have ever written a lyric or a note, you are encouraged to bring an instrument and your lyrics.

Extra Credit: Students who would like to have a set of lyrics, music or a song featured in the workshop should submit either lyrics, music, sheet music or recordings at least two weeks in advance. If you are willing to perform the song live, I will have a guitar and keyboard available. The work can be finished or in any stage of development. We will examine several of these as a group which will either convince you that your song is perfect or help find ways to make it more “perfecter.”

Legal disclaimer: Songwriting is invigorating, exhausting, infuriating and immensely rewarding. Rules will be broken.