I wouldn’t say it’s 100% so, but I’ll freely admit that up until now I’ve mostly been one of those navel-gazing songwriters. I just enjoy examining my own life and mining it for songwriting-worthy material.
Many terrific songwriters, of course, never — or no longer — write songs about themselves, but instead focus on telling other people’s stories.
I was recently “wowed” by one contemporary folk songwriter, Joe Crookston, an Ithaca-based performer who has been a Mountain Stage New Song Finalist, a Falcon Ridge Emerging Artist, yada yada yada.
I was also surprised to hear that he’s actually also a Rockefeller Foundation Songwriting Grant recipient — he applied for and received a grant in 2007 to travel around the Finger Lakes region of New York, interview people, collect stories and write songs. Neat, huh?
How the grant was created has an interesting backstory, Crookston says — basically, in 2005 corporate music giant Sony/BMG was fined for engaging in “payola,” an illegal yet common practice of record labels paying off music DJs to play their artist’s music. The company was found guilty and ordered to pay a portion of the settlement to artists and non-profits around New York State…including the grant which Joe received.
Crookston says he’s inspired to write by such varied people, places, ideas and things as “great stories, drunken roosters, hope, rutabagas, life, death, slaves, troubled teens, Robert Frost, falcons, and the thread that runs through all of these things.”
I asked Joe a couple of questions about his hankering to tell other people’s stories in song:
Q: Why do you think it’s important to tell other people’s stories in song and not just your own? Do you also consider yourself a personal singer-songwriter or has that phase passed for you?
A: For me learning and telling other people’s stories helps me to understand the world around me informs my own life.. I also think there are many people who have great stories but never developed a way to put them out into the world. I do consider myself a personal songwriter. I think of it as shining the light of compassion on the characters in my songs..giving them personality and bringing them to life so the listener can “feel” the character and invest in them.. I have a song called Freddy The Falcon. A 17 year old boy locked up in Juvenille Detention…I feel like it’s one of my strongest story songs…give the facts AND create an emotional personal landscape through which the lister can identify and feel Freddy and ultimately care about him..
Q: What kind of stories do you think make the best songs? What kinds of stories would you be more likely to stay away from?
A: I would stay away from any story, but I would stay away from a heavy, self-absorbed presentation of the story. I believe any story can be told, but the way it is told is very important to me. A song can be a real downer and demand listeners to slog through it, or it can be a “window” through which the audience can see and hear truths that are universal and meaningful on a broad universal level.
Hmm…I agree! What do you think, Scenesters? Are you inspired to write songs about other people’s stories?
