I mentioned this book in some of our discussions in the September meeting so I thought I’d go into a little more detail here in The Bridge.

This is by far my favorite book on songwriting. This book is really good at tuning your awareness of how to draw on concrete images to bring your songs to life for your listeners. What I really like about it is that it is a series of exercises laid out in a well thought out progression.

Pat Pattison divides the book into 4 “Challenges.”

• Challenge 1: Object Writing

• Challenge 2: Metaphor

• Challenge 3; Object Writing With Metaphor

• Challenge 4: Writing In Rhythm & Rhyme

Each challenge is divided into 14 days. Each day has a set of 3 timed exercises: the first is 5 minutes, the second is 10 minutes and the third is 90 seconds. For each day, Pattison lays out something about writing that you’ll be exploring in that day’s exercise. Each exercise has a starting phrase or idea along with an example from Pattison’s students. So with reading his introduction, the examples and doing the exercises you’re looking at between 30 and 45 minutes a day for a couple of months. I like to get up early, fire up the espresso maker and sit down for the daily session.

Let me go into a little more detail with Challenge 1.

Challenge 1, Object Writing — involves exercises that help you “let your senses drive the bus.” In these exercises you don’t worry about story lines or even full sentences. They are exercises in staying with your senses as you write — “sense-bound free association.” As Pattison says, “There’s no reason to stay loyal to the subject that sets you on your path. Your senses are driving the bus — you can go wherever they take you. The object you begin with might only be the starting point.”

After introducing the senses that are used in object writing — Sight, Sound, Taste, Touch, Smell, Body, Motion—Pattison leads you through four sets of different kinds of object writing:  

Days 1-5 you focus on “What Writing.”

Days 6-8 you work with “Who Writing”

Days 9-11 you go into “When Writing”

Days 12-14 you work with “Where Writing.”

As mentioned above, you move from this foundation to Metaphor, then Object Writing With Metaphor and finally Writing in Rhythm and Rhyme.

Pat Pattison is a professor at Berklee College of Music and his students include John Mayer and Gillian Welch. You find him on the web right here.

A while back we received a note from Walt Frazier. He addressed some of the reasons he enjoys being part of the group. His thoughts might encourage you to join or suggest membership to other local songwriters. Here’s what Walt had to say.

Explaining the positives requires understanding negatives. Staring with the latter: At times I have been intimidated when presenting a new song to the group. It is mostly my fault. I wrote a song about time a while back and still struggle with how to present it musically. I knew it did not sound right. The only advice was to add chords...I guess isn't enough. Someone heard me working on the song (in another place) and said, the chords are ok, but you need more variety in the melody. My original was that time moves on no matter, like a marching soldier... even from a literary point of view not so good. However, now that I am thinking about the melody, I am making progress.

From a good point view, people are very understanding of a geezer who started playing guitar and writing songs at the tender age of 68. Also, a couple people who have helped a lot noted these simple and easily applied ideas: When the song is finished ... play a chord and stop. Also, helped me improve my playing by noting simply this: "Keep time... the right hand rules in guitar, especially when strumming. I worked this and many folks have said "Hey you're improving."

Finally, there have been some challenges in the past year having nothing to do with music or songwriters that have required time.

You folks have a great concept.

Here's some ideas: Guest poets, teachers of music and/or students of music that can speak to the differences between writing a song and writing a song with music. Also, the workshops. One of the best for me was when I was working on a tone poem...I got little, but then someone showed me how to make the words work with a fairly simple chord progression using some 7ths.

Good luck. If time and circumstances permit, I promise I will try to make a meeting and pay my dues.