Take Your Song Above The Treeline

Into the Unknown - SONG CAMP WEEK 4

Welcome to week 4 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.

We packed our bag and gathered our tools. We got walking and started collecting observations. We made our first camp and explored space and rest. Today we are going above the treeline. I don’t know what’s up there.

The place where we leave the trees is kind of mystic. They don’t exactly just stop, although some mountains I’ve been up, it’s more abrupt than others. They become shorter, more gnarled by the elements. They spread out and get thinner and thinner, and you might not even realize you passed the last one, and that you are, in fact, above the treeline.

We’ll wind our way through sedges and bluets, mountain blueberries, Paintbrushes, and beargrass.If we’re extra lucky, we might see a ptarmigan- turning brown again for the summer, or a mountain bluebird, which is a color I can only describe as bursting blue, because that blue is so vivid it should be a verb. Marmots might pop up and scurry from one den to another. A real treat is a mountain ram. A real bummer is a mountain goat. Those things are aggressive, and way too many hikers have fed them. Probably the closest call I’ve ever had with a bad wildlife encounter was with a mountain goat who would not back down, couldn't care less about the rocks we were throwing at it, and maybe wanted to lick us. They do love salt.

The alpine zone is stunning. In a place where the winter is too harsh for trees, sturdy little berries survive the snows and then support a blaze of summer that buzzes with sweet smells and color.

Sometimes these alpine meadows roll on for miles and miles and gently deliver us to a rocky top. Sometimes we pass through this zone quickly and get to places that are too steep for the flora, and only mosses and lichens can make it on the rocks. We don’t know until we get there.

This is the liminal space between the forest and the summit. We will find spots that we aren’t sure how to navigate. The trail might disappear into the rocks, and we have to find our own way to scramble up to the next cairn or viewpoint.

This is the realm where we might need to put our hands down and scramble to get up and over a ledge. It’s one thing when it’s just your body, and a whole other game when you are wearing that 30 lb pack. This is the point where we might come to an outcropping that we don’t know the best way to get over, and we still won’t know what comes after it. We try to come prepared, but we still have to engage with the unknown.

So too with songs, I often reach a point where I can’t finish the song from where I am. I have to learn something.

“We don’t get better without getting braver.” Brad Montague

I’m not saying every song that is written has this “unknown” phase. I’m sure there are very popular songs whose writers had a process that didn’t need a quest into the unknown, but any song that I have written and loved has had some point of needing to go beyond what I know. That experience is echoed by artists up and down the avenue. The poet Andrea Gibson says it so beautifully: “I now understand that to not know where I am going is my only true compass.”

The only way I can think to describe what will happen is that your song will teach you something, and you can’t finish the song until you learn it. I don’t know how to tell you to navigate this. That’s the whole “unknown” part.

I can tell you, for me, it usually involves trying to find a deeper way to be curious and open. Lyrically and musically. If we keep showing up, we keep going there, to that place where we don’t know what we are doing, and we learn to surrender to it. We keep working on our skills. We study what works. We keep on collecting pieces of our known world - fragments of objective reality we can describe with our senses. Then we take that all to the unknown and see what we learn. This sounds hard. It is. It takes grit. It’s also playful. And delightful. Songs are enchanting; let your songs enchant you. Follow the fun.

SONG CAMP WORKSHOP

Before we dive into the workshop, I need your feedback on something. We need some face to face time. I want to start a weekly live work session/Q & A class. I need to know what times would work for you! If you couldn’t make any of these, and you really want to attend, send me a message with a range of times that would work and I will try to find a time that serves the most people. My hope is that we could dedicate the first part of our meeting to working on our songs (or poems, or grant proposals- any writing that you have on your plate) and then the second half we could do a class/Q&A about our process. (I will record the class sections)