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Songwriters come to Toronto Songwriting School from many different backgrounds with a wide range of goals and aspirations. We love seeing songwriters who have joined our community through classes, workshops, and getaways go on to create powerful and inspiring new music. Today, we’re celebrating three female songwriters with new releases that we think you should check out! Gracie Jet – Be Like Us Gracie Jet started working with us during the pandemic. She had been singing and writing songs for a while, but…

Asking songwriters to submit a song inspired by this period of COVID-19 closures and restrictions, the Lockdown Songwriting Contest sought to highlight the talent and creativity of songwriters faced with a pandemic. Our first-ever songwriting contest, we received over 60 entries, and it was honestly very hard to narrow down the list of winners. The winning entry, receiving $200 in prize money, was sent in by Clare Siobhan. Born in Truro, NS, she now resides in Sackville, NB. Her song “Ten Speed Bike” taps…

Like all of you, we have been following the updates on the spread of COVID-19, and we wanted to check in with our songwriting community to see how you’re holding up through all this. Here at Toronto Songwriting School, we are still holding some private lessons and recording sessions. We’ve enhanced our cleaning and disinfecting protocols, so we wipe down and spray every microphone, instrument, seating area, flat surface, door knob, and railing immediately before each class and repeat this procedure immediately following the class.…

September 27, 2019, TorontoJohn McGrath is an author and former reporter for CBC Radio. I’ve known you as an arts administrator and bureaucrat for decades.  Why write songs and produce an album now? I would say that I am uncovering the deep past. I’ve always loved music. In high school and university. I started playing music with friends. We were writing songs and trying to be like a group of the 1970’s. It was fun, but everyone drifted-off. I went on to do…

Everyone who was there agrees: New Orleans was the LeBron James of Songwriter Getaways. It was our ninth getaway, so by this point we have a handle on what makes them magical; it was our first international getaway, so there was an element of the unknown; and it was New Orleans, a city that is an absolutely unique nexus of culture and history and music and food and community. So maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised. (Did you know that New Orleans has…

Ah, the bridge….the most misunderstood, puzzling, hardest-to-identify, hardest-to-write part of a song. Apparently, in Nashville, they have ‘Bridge Specialists’ – songwriters who are called into sessions specifically to write bridges after the rest of the song is done. So if the pros struggle with bridges, what chance do the rest of us have? The reason bridges are so hard to write is that their job (and in some ways their ONLY job) is to be different from the rest of the song –…

When a new songwriter first starts writing songs, it’s often for their own benefit. They want to get their story told. As a songwriter develops, the attention shifts to the emotional impact those stories will have on the listener. The melody goes a long way toward setting the mood, but it’s the lyrics that your audience will be singing in their heart. One simple technique is using repetition to drive home the emotion. Dionne Warwick’s hit “I Say a Little Prayer” is a great…

Songwriting prompts aren’t cheating. For those of you who haven’t heard of them, songwriting ‘prompts’ are ideas for songs that someone gives you, to help spark creativity, push you in a different direction, or throw you into the deep end of the songwriting pool and force you to swim. They can be anything from “write a song about a colour” to “write a song about your first childhood memory” or really just about anything else. Rather than an ‘easy’ way to get ideas,…