Welcome to week 2 of SONG CAMP! This is a spring digital songwriting intensive over 6 weeks. WE ARE CLIMBING A MOUNTAIN, AND WRITING SOME SONGS. TOGETHER. We won’t be the same when we come back. A trip into the wilderness always changes us. We’ll explore and unite two practices, music and writing, and make something that combines them both.
Last week, in SONGS ARE A HUMAN THING, we packed our backpacks for the trek. This week, we are getting on the trail.
The trail. The path.
Everybody knows what a path is.
It lives in our collective consciousness and shows up over and over as a part of our life’s journey. There are dozens of common phrases- find the path, lose the path, stick to the path, and on and on. We use it to describe learning in our brains, setting down neural pathways. It’s more than just a physical thing- it’s a universal symbol that we use to understand our growth and transformation.
The path is there because people have travelled it before.
A Path is not always THE way, but it’s ONE way.
Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.- John Muir
Boots tied. Pack on. The way we begin is to just. start. walking.
At first, it’s awkward. We’re getting used to it, and it’s a little herky jerky. We probably have to stop and adjust the pack. We’re probably walking a little faster than we should with some of that antsy energy.
So we walk a little slower. The easiest way to avoid blisters? Walk slower. The easiest way to avoid roots? Walk slower. The easiest way to lift your head and notice what you see and hear? Walk slower.
We keep going, the walking becomes a rhythm, and that rhythm becomes a groove.
The groove gets wide, the groove gets deep. Easy to hear. Easy to keep.
The pack on your back starts to feel normal there. The sweat on your back is actually cooling you down. The mind chatter starts to melt into the birds’ chatter as they warn each other of the intrusion. You can lift up your eyes and notice the Skunk cabbage in the muddy spots just after we tiptoe on the rocks to get over the little spring streams that cross the trail. We can say our hellos to Trillium: the eight-inch Goddess of Spring. We can open up and take in where we are, because the path takes care of where we are going.
There will come a point on this journey where we will most likely not be able to see the path, but for now, it’s there for us, and we would be foolish not to take it. Getting to the top of a mountain takes an enormous amount of energy, we can’t afford to waste any bushwacking through the understory. I know there is a whole mythos around the “forge your own path” concept, but I say those folks have never worn a 30 lb backpack for 10 miles. If there is a path going in the direction we want to go, we take it. The path is our ally.
SONG CAMP WORKSHOP
When it comes to writing songs, it really helps to find a path we can follow up the mountain. There are many, but let’s start with two - one for our musical practice and one for our lyric writing practice: The ancient pentatonic scale, and the role of form in lyric writing.
THE PENTATONIC SCALE
The pentatonic scale is an ancient five-tone scale. Like - really ancient. A pentatonic flute made from a vulture bone found in a Stone Age cave in Germany tells us that these 5 tones have worn a 40,000-year-old path in the human psyche. Even if you think you don’t know it- you know it. It shows up in music all over the world, from Africa to Europe to China to North America. It’s Amazing Grace, Auld Lang Syne, and Chapell Roan’s Hot To Go. There are hundreds of melodies you know that are made from it. Here’s the MAJOR version.
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