Why this tune?
This week’s song is a collaboration that started in Scarlet Keys’ weekly songwriting class. Our group meets on Friday mornings to practice “object writing,” a method pioneered by The Berklee College songwriting legend Pat Pattison. The emphasis is on writing lyrics that draw on all of our senses, using visual imagery and concise, descriptive language to tell a musical story.
We write to a series of timed prompts and share our results with the class. This song started with the prompt “Tell Me About Yesterday.” (no surprise) My classmate Mitalee Christman came up with beautiful images that I proposed we expand into a song. We exchanged lyric and story ideas for a few weeks, while I worked on the music, which came out in the “classic” pop/jazz style of writers like Barry Manilow. We received helpful notes from Scarlet and shared this version with her and the class,
Mitalee and I are already working on another song.