Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold Is Teaching A Songwriting Workshop
Shervin Lainez
Fleet Foxes leader Robin Pecknold is someone who takes education seriously. Years ago, Pecknold took time off from shimmery indie-folk stardom to enroll in Columbia University. This year, Pecknold has been doing some freelancing, appearing on Big Red Machine’s album and hitting the studio with Kanye West and Post Malone. Today, Pecknold has announced that he’ll soon teach an online songwriting course for School Of Song.
Starting in January, Professor Pecknold will teach a four-week workshop. He’ll do lectures, live question-and-answer sessions, and he’ll presumably grade your writing assignments. Here’s how the School Of Song Instagram describes the topics that Pecknold will cover:
Process & Manifestos: In this class, we’re going to take a look at the full life-cycle of a song’s creation: how to come up with musical and lyrical ideas, achieving consistency by establishing a musical vision early on, and understanding the many different hats we have to wear as songwriters.
Melody & Lyrics: Stravinsky once said that melody is the only aspect of music that can’t be taught, but in this class we’ll give it our best shot, looking at various means of melodic development, the importance of rhythm to memorability, interval relationships, utilizing extensions and common tones, and techniques for writing melodies that accommodate harmonization. We will also explore the relationship between melody and lyrics.
Utilizing musical ‘technologies’ for defamiliarization: A song can (and should) start from anything, be it an unfamiliar instrument, a new plug-in or app, a strange tuning or harmonic mode, a YouTube video, a sample, or any number of things. In this class we’ll discuss the difference between songcraft and the employment of these novel technologies, and the importance of both to the creative process.
Attention & Novelty: How can we best rise to the occasion of maintaining a listener’s attention? We’ll discuss this question at many timescales: over the course of a song, throughout an album, & over an entire career. We’ll talk about solving the problem of managing expectations and surprise. We’ll also explore the closely related topic of novelty (both to ourselves as creators and others as listeners).
I wonder if the Attention & Novelty class will cover Pecknold’s former Fleet Foxes bandmate Father John Misty. Pecknold’s course costs $120, which is actually way less than I was expecting, and you can sign up here.
