Kiwifolk.com
Folk and Acoustic Music in New Zealand
Folk and Acoustic Music in New Zealand
Download Google Pack, heaps of usefull software including the highly acclaimed Picasa, the software that should've come with your camera. Organise and share your photos - it's free!
Song is perhaps the single most important evocation that defines and documents ourselves, our peoples and cultures, our histories and our hopes and fears for the future. A song can evoke moods and feelings that other historical documents lack. Songs are rarely objective, they inevitably say something about the attitude of the author as well as the singer and as such are very important in narrating ourselves and our experiences in a way that newspaper clippings do not. Even badly written songs can tell us a lot! But a good song will endure through many generations as a capsule of the essence of that time. It is important, therefore, that as a people we are always writing songs and passing them on.
What follows is a presentation given by the author at a seminar for New Zealand songwriters in Gore in May 2007. It is about getting started as a songwriter, establishing the discipline of writing, overcoming "writer's block" and completing the work. It presupposes no particular musical ability (many of the greatest songwriters had little or none). It also looks at the differences between right- and left-brain thinking and how to use each, as well as learning to recognise when we are being “original” and then developing that ability.
Remember, writing songs is about doing it, not thinking about doing it. Start now!
