For much of my life, I have felt like an anomaly. These past few years of moving around, I thought I had found peace with this feeling. Tonight, I went to my second ever open mic in Lowell at the Back Page. All day, I had felt in a bit of a funk, not myself….
Tag: marieke slovin
The Past Is Close Behind: A Holocaust Story-to-Song
This past week, I began my first post-doc Story-to-Song. I spent a few hours on a Tuesday afternoon working with a woman (I will call her Amy) who was the sole member of her family to survive the Holocaust. Her daughter (I will call her Dana) had attended a program offered by Lowell National Historical…
Songwriting Step III: The painful part
The third step in a Story-to-Song is to sing. This is the part that is my least favorite. My inner critic tends to be at its most powerful and convincing at this early stage of the songwriting process. This is also the roughest of cuts. I gently tap the red record button on my ipod…
Songwriting Step II: Making the words appear singable
The next step in the Story-to-Song process is to prepare the text for the first singthrough. I take that big block of words all strung together and shape it to look like one long poem. This essentially means looking at the text and imagining reading or singing a line of words. Inhale, speak or sing…
An unexpected meeting
I have never been one to rely too heavily on ideas like destiny or fate, but discovering the ukulele may very well be one of those indescribable phenomena that shapes our lives ever after. I was attending a writing workshop in Eastern Oregon when the fateful moment occurred. Two musicians, Kate Power and Steve Einhorn,…
Guiding Song 