Fossils

A few weeks ago I started teaching keyboards at the School of Rock, and one of my favorite things so far has been how many of the students there are already writing their own original material. I'm running a songwriting workshop there tonight and in prepping for it I decided to look for notes I took a long time ago at a songwriting workshop at Berklee. (How long ago? So long ago that when I got to Berklee's building on Mass Ave., I thought Boston was a big city. I know, crazy!)

At the time, I really had no idea what I was doing. I was very new to songwriting per se; I could write music but not necessarily a proper song. My memory of the workshop has always been that I severely needed the exposure to other songwriters my own age, but I didn't find the classes applicable to my own writing process at the time, if you can call it that. Regardless, it looks like I actually took attentive notes at this thing.

Reading them now is eerie after many years of songwriting experience. I see a lot of my current process and technique in these notes, which is odd considering how little stock I put in those classes at the time. It's making me think that perhaps there is actually something common to everyone's songwriting process that can be quantified or articulated. Either that, or I somehow subconsciously absorbed all of that information until it manifested itself in my songwriting.

In my notes I also wrote down that an appearance on "The Tonight Show" is worth roughly $4,400. Thanks for breaking it down for me, Berklee.