TGIF and happy last weekend of July! Today I’m spotlighting a terrific singer/songwriter who hails Western Massachusetts: Jenny Goodspeed. Her 2007 debut CD, Under the Ash Tree, was released with great success, including a stint at the 2009 Falcon Ridge Folk Festival’s Emerging Artists Showcase and the 2009 Mountain Stage NewSong Contest. These days, she’s 1/3 of a new trio, The Boxcar Lilies.
Have a listen to Jenny’s songs here
Songwriting start: “I wrote my first “real” song in college to woo a guy. (It worked.) I kept songwriting just for fun throughout the rest of college. Then when I was about half way through a doctoral program in psychology, I decided I’d much rather be writing and performing instead, so I quit and started putting more energy into songwriting.”
Songwriting influences: ”Joni Mitchell is my number one influence (no surprise there.) Some others are/were Bruce Cockburn, James Taylor, Stephen Sondheim, Ben Folds. I’m a huge fan of great melodies. That to me is the most important part of a song.”
Songwriting style: “I write in different styles, but I’m usually somewhere along the contemporary-folk-acoustic-Americana continuum – with some “70s singer-songwriter” thrown in.”
Songwriting love: ”The way you can string together certain chords or create a melody that evokes a particular emotion – then marry those chords or notes to words that perfectly reflect the sentiment in the music. It’s hard, but when it works, you get goosebumps. And if it really works, when you perform the song for an audience, the goose bumps are still there. I love that.”
Songwriting tip: “Once you finish your song, edit your lyrics. Go back and see if you can take out any extraneous words – they tend to suck all the power out of a song. I also look to see if I can rewrite any lines that begin with humdrum words like “The” or “There was” or “And” and give them a more interesting start.”
