When I teach songwriting, I often start by having the kids do research, which might not seem like a usual way to write a song, but often if you decide on a topic and then you do some research on that topic, you will begin to have more ideas than you had originally. So one of the things that I’ve really been enjoying lately is bringing other kinds of disciplines into the writing, so I will teach a songwriting workshop that is really related to science.
So we’ll chose a science concept. It might be biology, and perhaps in the school they are studying the behavior of bees, so we’ll do some research on bees and jot down all the interesting things that we can think of about bees, and then I’ll help them to look for what in all of that pops out as good material for a song?
We’ll look for metaphors. We’ll look for symbols. We’ll look for concepts that have real potential for rhythm, for rhyme, and we’ll write a rough draft of a song around that, that gets at those science concepts but in a really creative way. So I love doing those cross—discipline kinds of workshops where students are learning another topic, like science, but they’re also using all of the great literary elements.
They’re using their writing skills to put together something that really is exciting to them and that enables them to share and show what they’ve learned.
