Songwriting Panel on JoCo Cruise 2022
Channel: Angela Brett
Date: 2022-04-11

The songwriting panelists introduce themselves: Paul and Storm from Paul and Storm, Ben from Jukebox the Ghost, Dessa, Jonathan Coulton from JoCo Cruise, and Zoë Keating from Zoë Keating. They start by talking about their process. Zoë reveals that there are words to her songs, but only she knows them. 

I heard there were some secret words
that Zoë wrote, and we never heard.
They’re never sung aloud; they’re purely mental.
She makes sure titles don’t confess
the merest hint from which we’d guess;
we only hear a rousing instrumental.
Instrumental, instrumental, instrumental, instrumental.

They talk about whether they write for themselves or with an audience in mind. Jonathan talks about how he would love to do a 90-minute concert of sad songs (doesn’t he always do that?). “Fart joke, fart joke, fart joke, ta da!” is the name of my Paul and Storm cover band. Dessa has an invisible backpack, Paul has a bindle on a stick, and Storm has a junk drawer.

0:00 Intro
23:48 Have you seen the film Get Back, and what were the most surprising things you saw in that as songwriters?
27:04 The last couple of years have been creatively rough. How do you address times of creative lull, and take care of yourselves?
35:25 Do you have any methods to kickstart your creative process, or if you see a wall coming, get over that wall?
40:18 Have you heard of this guy Jonathan Coulton who wrote a Thing a Week for a year? (That’s me being a smartass)
46:25 What’s your ratio? How many songs you write versus how many someone else has heard, how many are performed live, or recorded?
48:27 When you finish a piece, do you run it by your families?

Everything I can publish from the cruise is in the playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ-l6mr1dW0jS5TVzK8GDZnpvzuBL4op8