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 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…