Lyons Song School

On Sunday we're heading to the Song School associated with the Lyons Folk Festival. This is a great event that I had the fortune to attend last year. Over four days, there will be a variety of classes and workshop put on by performers from the Festival. The best part for me last year, however, was walking through camp and listening to the many talented songwriters that haven't made it to the festival stage, yet. Seeing all this talent explains why it's so hard to make it as a songwriter.

Julie will be attending for the first time and I can only imagine how popular she will be, being one of the few violinists in camp. I predict that she'll be on stage at least four times accompanying other artists (see laughs at this, but we'll see next week).

In preparing for the school we've starting practicing hard. One thing that we noticed is that we've worked on a large number of songs, but except for songs that we've played on stage, we haven't clearly worked out all our timing issues. Getting a song performance quality takes another level of work.

We're are looking forward to Steve Seskin's workshop on collaboration. We've done really well at co-writing lyrics on political songs. For our other joint efforts, one or the other wrote the lyrics, with the other's contribution coming through the music. It would be great to expand our co-writing efforts.