International Songwriting Week

The songwriting and production students from PopAkademie in Germany and Columbia College Chicago joined forces for a intensive songwriting challenge where we were sorted into teams and put in a room to write for 12 hours a day. I had the great fortune to be writing with Nashville native Francis King and a fantastic German producer Dennis Borger. The creative output felt like an exhausting yet wonderful dream sequence. Every morning at 9:30am we would walk into the writing lab with a pen, paper, and laptop, then stumble out sometime in the night with a new song in our hands. After the long week, working closely with international songwriter Michelle Leonard (you may have heard her writing on AURORA-Running With the Wolves) and Tom Deininger (of the band Klee), our team ultimately presented four songs: Two brand new electro/pop club bangers, where you can hear Francis’s saucy vocals, a film score (tightly under-wraps hush hush soon to be released stuff), and a video game score in which I play a passive-aggressive robot. Yes you read that right. I finally got to put my smooth, Siri voice to good use giving directions to gamers to “kill as many robots as possible”.

The last two days are in the studio at RaxTrax Recording where we laid down the tracks and vocals for our songs. Studio time will always be my favorite part of the writing process. It’s the point where visions are realized. Everything you heard in your head gets fed into high-quality mics and pumped out through massive studio speakers and you think to yourself, “whoa. I made something.” After recording piano on one of the tracks I nearly cried from joy upon hearing playback. When you’ve worked so hard on a project your heart connected with and you hear it for the first time it’s surreal. And let me assure you, nothing beats the dynamics of a well-kept studio grand piano. Every emotion I put into the keys was received and fed into the mics.

I can’t wait for you to hear the results of this creative retreat. It was a subversive and wonderful week full of inspirational people and sounds. I can’t wait to do more musical collaborations and continue bringing new songwriters into my work!