One True Sentence: Songwriting with Bridget Kearney (December '22)

All access to lecture recordings, songwriting prompts and all course materials for Bridget Kearney's (Lake Street Dive) songwriting workshop taught in December 2022. By purchasing this past course, you're able to watch Bridget's lectures and go about the course at your own pace!

Bridget's lectures cover the following topics and themes:

1. Tasty little morsels of melody
2. Lying in song and also telling the truth
3. Rhythm in everything
4. Duraflame firestarters for starting a song when you think you don't have any ideas (beacuse you ALWAYS do!)
5. The what-do-I-do-in-verse-2 conundrum

This course also includes songwriting prompts from Bridget such as "Essentials", "Melodic Contour", "Groove", and "Writing while recording".

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Here's a quote from Bridget on the class...

"The first song I can remember writing was called “Walking Along in the Forest” and I wrote it when I was probably 5 years old. I can still recall how thrilling and invigorating it was to sit down at the piano and plunk out a series of notes that sounded new and good to me (what I would now call a “bass line”) and then hum another series of notes atop it and come up with words to narrate the spirit of those new notes (what I would now call a “melody” and “lyrics.”) Without even having the language to describe these things, I was able to experience the joy of creating a new song and sharing it with people. Soon enough my family knew the words too and would sing along when I played it, or even request for me to play it (and admittedly sometimes had to request for me to STOP playing it.) This is basically the feeling I’ve been chasing for the last 32 years of writing and performing songs—that magical moment between having nothing and then having produced “a song” that expresses some part of yourself, communicates that to those that hear it and has the potential to last forever. 

Since that first song, I’ve developed a lot of other techniques to employ in the great pursuit of song, things like “melodic rhythm” and “narrative voice” and “harmonic modulation” and “arresting first lines” and “post-choruses.” With so many parameters to play with, the possibilities are truly endless, which can be intimidating at times. But zooming in on each of a song’s fundamental building blocks can help us learn to strategically pull those levers at the perfect time to create maximum impact for the story we’re trying to tell and the feeling we’re trying to communicate. In my class, we’ll talk about some very practical ways that we can use all of the tools in our songwriter’s toolbox to get us to an ever richer, more mature and nuanced version of that feeling I had in 1990 plunking notes out on the piano and realizing, with utter delight, that “chorus” rhymes with “forest” and thus completing my first song’s lyrics as such:

Walking along in the forest

Singing a song, with a chorus too

(The song actually does not have a chorus! Excellent use of “poetic license,” young Bridget!) 

- Bridget Kearney

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This "Past Course" includes:

1. Class Video Recordings – Watch all 5 of Bridget Kearney's lectures + Q&A's on her songwriting process.
2. All course materials, including songwriting prompts crafted by Bridget.
3. Access to the "community jukebox" – upload your new songs to the jukebox and share the tunes with fellow classmates!

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Q: What musical experience is required to understand the material in this course?

A: People across all musical levels will be able to gain something from the course. However, it will be helpful to be comfortable playing a few basic chords on any instrument of your choice in order to complete the songwriting prompts.

Q: What if I’ve never written a song before? Can I still participate in this workshop?

A: Yes! As with any new skill, just starting is usually the hardest part. This workshop will provide the structure and accountability we all need to get started and follow through, for beginners and old guard writers alike.

Q: What is different about watching this past course versus participating while the workshop is run live?

A: By purchasing this course, you'll have access to the same resources as the students who took the course while it was running other than the live songshares. 

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Questions? Email us at hi@schoolofsong.org.