Lesson 4: Effective Creativity Workshop
Lesson 4 of the Effective Creativity Workshop
This is the last installment of our month-long course on Effective Creativity, or making music that connects deeply with fans.
DYL2M will be slowing down for the second half of December and we’ll be back in January with a MONTH LONG COURSE ON ARTIST BRANDING!
It’s going to be a blast.
We’ll cover:
Artist Message & Bio
Artist Image & Visual Identity
Artist Voice (writing + speaking in character with authority)
A Secret Fourth Thing
But first.
You’re not going to get a whole lot out of the Artist Branding Workshop unless you’ve done the work in our Effective Creativity Workshop.
Why? Because if you can’t articulate what’s at the core of your creative offering, good branding work is basically impossible.
But don’t worry! There’s plenty of time to get caught up. We’ve even got two live sessions remaining before the end of the year. If you haven’t been following along and you’re ready to dive into the Creativity Course and kick off 2025 by creating a super dialed artist brand, you dial that in right now.
Great. And for those of you who have been following along…
Last week, hundreds of you joined me in the exercise of examining what we hide as artists. We discussed how the parts of ourselves that we’re most afraid to show truly hold the keys to the kingdom when it comes to creating music that connects deeply with others.
As people shared their exercise answers in the Dedicate Your Life To Music Discord group, I felt incredibly inspired. People described experiencing shame, isolation, religious and sexual trauma, discrimination of every kind. Truly, the heaviest kinds of human burdens.
But then I looked back at our intro section, where everyone had shared the beautiful, vibrant music each person had made in spite of all the pain they carry. It’s incredible how resilient people can be, and I think that’s extra true for people who are close to music, which can hold us through so much.
We dug deep and wrote down how we could learn to embody healing, to ask for support, and to set off with more intention on the journey of becoming the artists we were born to be.
This week I’m writing a simple integration exercise that will help you fold the clarity you gained last week into your work in a very practical way. It is also the final step in the Effective Creativity course we’ve been working our way through.
This exercise is designed to help you do something incredibly plain:
Communicate something true that you’ve needed to hide.
As artists, there’s not much more we can offer to our listeners.
The hidden thing can be any feeling, urge, or aspect of yourself you’ve felt the need to hide or contain. It can be your weirdness, your desire, your debauchery, your joy, your pain, your anger, your humor. Nothing is off limits.
I’ve never written a songwriting exercise before, but that’s what’s about to happen.
I know that there’s no one way to write a song. Not all of this will apply to every genre. Below are my guidelines, but view them more as intentions and less as prescribed instructions. What I laid out looks like a lyrics-first plan, but I always write lyrics and melody simultaneously, so don’t feel like any of these need to happen in order. Notice that the exercise is in bullet, not number form.
Creative Authenticity Songwriting Exercise
Refer back to your answers from last week. Pick something you’ve felt you had to hide or deny in yourself in order to avoid judgement and rejection.
Write in the first person, as plainly as you can, from your own perspective, about what it’s like having this piece of you. Not even about the judgement of having that part rejected, simply about what this part of you feels like.
An example could be “being this ugly is heavy, dull, comfortable, final.”
As you go, massage these words into song lines, however makes sene to you. Use fewer, simpler words than you usually do.
Find chord changes and a melody that sound the way you feel in this hidden space.
Don’t worry too much about providing context or backstory. You can add that in later if you want to, just take as much space and time as you can describing the thing you’re hiding.
Include visual or scenic details of the scenes you associate with this experience to add specificity and texture.
If you’re writing about something painful, resist the urge to write about the resolution to the problem. Let the song exist in the discomfort of the experience.
See if you can grow the feeling of the thing you’ve hidden. See if you can embody it with more energy and intensity as you approach the chorus. See if you can have fun sharing something that feels dangerous.
Can you sing these words right from the belly of the place where this hidden part of you lives?
Repeat these steps as many times as you need to with other hidden aspects of yourself.
Please share how this exercise went for you and share with your collaborators if you feel moved to do so.
Looking forward to seeing/hearing paid subscribers work in the discord and linking up with y’all this Friday at 12 pacific for our weekly live call.
Sending nothing but love,
Cass