A Conversation with Annie Gallup (continued)

PM: I know that sometimes you do songwriting workshops. Now, some of our songwriter friends who do such a thing take variously casual approaches to that situation. But a mutual friend of ours said, "Oh, no, I saw one of Annie's workshops. It's quite a different thing, I assure you"--which, of course, didn't surprise me. He said, "Annie Gallup's songwriting workshop, that was more like a master class." He said, "She took a song of hers and disassembled it in such a way where you could see not only why the rhyme scheme works here and there, but how this led to this, and the meaning of this is revealed here, et cetera, and you understand how this was necessary for this to occur later." He said it was unbelievable. So say something, if you would, about the way you like to do songwriting workshops, and if you like to do them.

AG: Songwriting workshops, I have to really prepare for, yeah. It's going to a whole different place than performance does. The way I approach the workshop is that learning song craft is fine-tuning your intuition so that you'll make very good choices. Rather than learning a set of rules or established formats, think about what you're trying to do and how you're going to get there. It's all done through a series of choices. And then I approach it as: this is what this particular choice means, to do a perfect rhyme here versus the effect it will have on your listener, the effect of surprise, or closure, or leading forward, or intent--just all of the different choices that you make.

PM: And as an old friend of yours, who has been at your house, I've seen part of your process revealed, and just have come upon a piece of paper--where there will be like two sheets of notes about something that later became a line in a song. [laughs] A line.

AG: Yeah.

PM: And I don't think that most songwriters understand that, that some people go to that extent.

AG: Yeah, I think my process isn't as linear as "this is what I want to say, and therefore I will say it in these words, or as "here's a picture, and this is how it relates to this picture." I'm looking for the relationship between things that interest me. And it is sort of putting things in respect to each other in a way that they create a space. I think that would be how I would describe my process. It's not a linear thing, even though I'm writing stories that have a linear thread through them sometimes. So, for me, it's about the relationship between things.

PM: The story may be a whole lot more linear than the structure of the story is. It's certainly not a brick and mortar kind of thing, yeah.

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