Songwriting, you ask? Yeah, if you missed it, I was invited to attend the Iowa Songwriter’s Guild meeting last month and they planted the bug again. So I’ve been keeping the songwriting idea in mind, looking for and writing down ideas, phrases, and so on. I have at least one idea that I really like as a concept; now I have to find a way to put actual words to it.

As a worship leader and accompanist for many years, one of my greatest gifts has been that I have an immense capacity for remembering music and lyrics and then playing them back. I could sit down with nothing more than a list of song titles and play and sing you songs for hours and hours. That skill, though, seems to become a curse when it comes to songwriting. Because I have trained my brain for so many years to remember and replay other people’s melodies and lyrics, now when I try to create my own phrase, I write down two words and it makes some other song lyric pop into my head. Play a couple of chords and it pops a song into my head. And once it’s in my head, it’s hard to banish.

I’m going to keep at it, though, and hope to attend January’s Guild meeting with at least something to show for my efforts. I may not ever turn out a great song, but it’s at least worth the effort to try.

I’ll work through that title backwards. How do you know when you have some musical kinship with someone else? How about when they pull out that obscure song that they really like and want you to hear… and it’s a song you’ve been playing on repeat on your iPod for weeks?

That very thing happened last night at Nick and Allie’s house. After the Iowa Songwriter’s Guild house show I hung out for a while to hear some of Allie’s new hymntunes and to generally talk music with Nick, and he pulled out The Khrusty Brothers’ Sympathy for Jesus. What a great song. That provoked a discussion on Don Chaffer and Waterdeep, and ended up with Nick lending me all of his Waterdeep CDs so I can take a listen. So far, so good.

Earlier in the evening Nick & Allie hosted the Iowa Songwriters’ Guild monthly meeting, which this month was a special house show. Each of the writers played a couple of songs, and I quite enjoyed hearing folks share their talent. I was motivated to try to dust off my long-neglected songwriting chops; what remains to be seen is if that motivation will last long enough to actually write anything. Nick did send a book on songwriting home with me, though, so I’ll have to take a look at it. We’ll just have to see how it goes.