The March 16th Song Doctor Workshop was a roaring success. Seven songwriters showed up, me making eight. Six of the attending songwriters heard about it from MeetUp, one from Craig's List. Thanks to Eileen Batson for setting up MeetUp and putting the announcement on Craig's List (and everywhere else she could find).Six writers presented songs and the positive critiques were lively. Dennis Mikel brought the same song he brought last time, with changes spurred by that previous workshop. Everyone loved the song with minimal comments about what to fix. There was a “cowboy-type ballad,” a stream-of-conscious pop song and several country and folk songs.
It is very clear that the standard of NC songwriters will be raised by workshops such as this.
Formula songs was the subject of my brief talk. I went over a popular formula, Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus - Bridge - Chorus. We then took a line from here, a line from there and wrote a song called (Ken Cleary's suggestion) “My Dog Died.” It's not great art, but it's a cute song and it's formula, by golly!
Though there were only six presenting songs, we did run pretty long. The idea is to get everyone home in time for Prime Time television. We're holding the workshop to 10 in the future in order to not run long. If there is a demand for more, we'll come up with a solution.
- Jon Batson
