I Can’t… Write a Song! Workshop
TCC McKeon Center for Creativity
Tulsa
June 22, 2024
Songwriting is a strange art, hard to explain, harder to practice. The art of the song is wide-ranging enough to hold everything from “Baby Shark” to “Old Town Road” to “The Times They Are A’Changin’” to “King Kunta,” and techniques vary from the Indian raga to the Baptist hymn. Any creative soul would be forgiven in believing that the art was too complicated, the possibilities too numerous, to even attempt a stab at it.
Songwriter Jesse Aycock did his best to dispel that myth at last weekend’s “I Can’t… Write a Song” workshop, put on by Tulsa Community College and the Woody Guthrie Center. (TCC hosts these free “I Can’t” workshops regularly on Saturdays, all led by Tulsa artists and pitched for beginners.) I remember seeing Aycock at the “First Cut is the Deepest” show at Thelma’s Peach last fall, showing a song that he had written at age 12, and even then it was obvious that he had significant talent. But not everyone starts from that point, which is why a little instruction can be helpful.
Aycock’s delivery and message were simple: A song has a few parts, but not many rules. The fact that it’s counterintuitive forces the maker to be a little headstrong in forging a path through the ambiguity of the form. We were encouraged to write a verse and a chorus onto a pre-made melody and chord structure supplied by Aycock and his acoustic guitar.
His blues-inspired chord structure pushed me to an old familiar concept: I’ll go down to the river/and wait for my love to show, I wrote, describing a made-up story of two young lovers who promised to meet at a river when they’re older — but one never arrives. Do you remember?/Cause I sure do/The way we loved/When we used to. It might not change the world, but it was fun to write.
I would have sat through about six million of these workshops, each exploring a different aspect of the songwriting form. With only 45 minutes to make his point, Aycock gave us a brief overview that was light on detail, but easy enough to follow for the layperson to get a quick idea. And at the end of the day, that’s how so many songs get a foothold in this world: quick ideas written on scraps of paper and bar napkins, just snippets of song, caught like a fish in the river, wriggling to break free.
Next at TCC McKeon Center for Creativity: Oklahoma Pastel Society Annual Members’ Exhibit, opening July 12
