Learning Songwriting with Brian Eno
"It all feeds you."
At some point at the end of 2024, I received an email from Brian Eno’s mailing list which noted was that he was going to be doing an online songwriting workshop and that subscribers to the mailing list were eligible for a 20% discount. I think it ended up being $136, or in that vicinity, which seemed to me personally like a bargain? So I checked my calendar to make sure I wasn’t double-booked and I signed up.
I know the cliche is that music journalists are frustrated rock stars but I have never ever had any interest in being onstage. I have wished many times that my father had allowed me to select drums as my instrument in elementary school band (Jerry Rose, of blessed memory: “Drums are heavy, you won’t be able to carry them in a parade. You should play the flute, it’s lighter.”) and I have wished that I didn’t give up on my piano lessons once I started playing flute but there wasn’t some secret burning need to be in a band.
On the other hand, understanding songwriting from Brian fucking Eno seemed like a thing that could potentially help me do my job better. I’d just seen the documentary earlier this year and he seemed to be in a place where Eno was interested in investing time figuring out what he actually does and how he does it, and so it seemed like a worthwhile gamble. There was something in the course description about not needing to ever have written a song or not actually needing to write any songs, but it did say “it would probably help if you had access to an instrument.”
Caryn Rose
At the time I signed up I had a pandemic-inspired harmonium (that was inspired by multiple rewatches of the Rolling Thunder Revue documentary) and a lap harp (which I thought might assuage my desire for an autoharp). I thought one of these items would be sufficient for my class-related noise-making needs. (They were not, but more on this later.)
The class was held under the aegis of an organization called School of Song, which, if you are not a musician, is probably an organization that you, like me, were completely unfamiliar with. They state, “We’re a songwriting school that offers workshops with acclaimed artists,” and they do it online, and they have figured out how to do that in a way that is incredibly effective. By that I mean their Zoom game is strong and they are pros at working together remotely. I signed up for this class on the strength of Eno’s reputation and it was only once I was doing it that I realized how incredibly bad this could have all been with a different kind of organization.
When the inevitable old white dude on his phone in portrait mode tried to center an activity around their inability to use technology, the moderators were kind but firm and basically told him they were moving on until he fixed his problem. They were specific about managing the Q&A (which was moderated) stating if you were going to ask a question it had to have a question mark at the end of it. When you showed up for a song share that required the group being divided into breakout rooms, they warned you in advance to be on time or they would ask you to come back another time because it would be too hard to allocate latecomers. And you got split into breakout rooms and back effectively. Plus they were all helpful and encouraging but not there to hold anyone’s hand. Part of their ethos is about date-driven specific actions. And given how many people in the chats had taken other classes from them, clearly this resonates.
The workshop consisted of four lectures from Eno, three live Q&A sessions, and then the aforementioned song shares, where you met up with classmates to share the product of your weekly homework, and you could show up to as many of those as you wanted. The lectures were all recorded so if you needed to miss one (or the time zone didn’t work for you) you could watch them later (and you can go pay for the workshop now and get access to the lectures & the Q&A recordings).
So I spent my January Sunday afternoons watching Brian Eno sitting in his studio talking to a large, diverse, international group of musicians about his process, and then checking back in on Wednesday afternoons for the Q&As. In between there was the homework, which involved writing a song under certain criteria and then uploading it to the School of Song homework portal where anyone in the class (including Eno) could (and did!) listen to your song homework.
There was an in-person song share after the workshop was over – as you can imagine, in places like NYC and LA there are enough attendees that these become real communities. (Here in Michigan, it was in Ypsilanti and I did not make it, which I'm kind of sorry about. I wish it had been in the afternoon and not at night.) There was also a vigorous chat going on every week during the lectures and Q&As in the Zoom chat, and there was a Discord as well. There was a lot on offer and a lot of ways to connect with other people, which is another deliberate hallmark of the SOS organization.
Eno had us write a song during the first lecture and we all just … went and did it. Some people shared. Other people didn’t. I decided I’d just do the exercises because I was there and I had paid for it and maybe I’d learn something. I’m pretty sure I did.
“The Edge said you taught him pragmatism.”
“That was nice of him.”
--Q&A on January 5
While talking about this class on Bluesky, several people asked if I was going to write about it, which was my intention until I got to the end of it and I realized that it wasn’t fair to everyone who had paid for the class, to Eno, and to the School of Song people to outline in painful detail what was said in each class, and I also didn't want to take those kinds of notes. But I think talking about some of my big impressions and takeaways is fair game.
-- Eno has lots opinions about the kinds of things that make good songs, and I realized that so do I!
-- He has strong opinions about his preferences in a recording studio, and although I had never thought about it previously, I quickly realized that I did as well and they were actually reasonably sound!
-- Brian Eno hates headphones as much as I do. He likes stereo speakers a lot: “We’ve come to think that speakers need to be invisible and that’s bollocks.”
But honestly, the biggest takeaway was just constant encouragement from him for us to do something, to have more than one art form, and to just do as much as possible without interrogating whether or not it was any good because your judgement is not very reliable. He told story after story about working on something, thinking it was garbage, and coming back to it in a year and going, “Oh, that was actually good” and then he’d play us whatever it ended up being.
I did not come into this class intending to write any songs and yet I wrote four of them, and recorded one (just using my iPhone) and uploaded it for a song share. The problem was that it was a lot harder to compose things on a harmonium than I anticipated, because you have to use one hand on the bellows and one hand on the keyboard, and the lap harp was kind of useless. What I wanted was an Omnichord – Eno’s instrument of choice for getting things started. There was a lot of “OMG THE OMNICHORD” in the Zoom chat when he brought it out – and thought I’d just pick up a used on eBay, but they’re pricey so that got tabled.
I am not going to share my songs because that is not why I did this, and I kind of object to our modern society where anything you’re remotely interested in needs to be documented and made available for public consumption. Another area where Eno and I are in vehement agreement is that it is enough if your art and your music is just for you. It doesn’t have to do more than that. I will probably keep fucking around with writing songs and trying things because because I believe it does give me an additional perspective through which to be able to write about music, and even if it didn’t, just playing music for yourself and writing songs for yourself is just as completely valid as doing it for clout. It is a thing we have lost and I am (again) completely in agreement with Eno that we are worse off creatively because people stopped making music, playing music, and singing for their own personal enjoyment. "It's an act of rebellion to opt out of capitalism," Eno said.
Downsides! I think that School of Song didn’t anticipate having people who weren’t already working musicians with ways to record music and instruments at hand, but that’s also not their target market so I’m not mad that the written instructions weren’t aimed at somebody like me. I’m confident that if I had reached out for help or advice of any kind about making the workshop work better for me, someone would have been happy to help.
The other issue was that one of the homework assignments involved a “digital detox” which involved things like (paraphrase) “if you need email for work then uninstall it every night when you are done with work and reinstall it the next day” which made me tired just thinking about it. My biggest annoyance with the detox is that I might have been willing to try it if I had known in advance that it was coming and not just presented with it on a Sunday afternoon. I’m sure others were in a similar boat.
But overall, man, what an incredible thing to just randomly decide to participate in, and how righteous that Eno would even care about doing something like this. He’s 76 years old. He doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to do at this point in his life, and he definitely didn’t need to be as prepared and engaged and fully present as he was for the live classroom parts of this as he was. He genuinely engaged with the questions in what certainly seemed like good faith, some answers were familiar but he wasn’t blandly regurgitating platitudes. He has a genuinely decent sense of humor and self-deprecation and if he was trying to advance an agenda, that agenda was CREATE MORE ART. "It all feeds you. Having fun is just as good as being serious," is another Eno quote.
He was also definitely part of the class. He tried to guess where people in the UK were from based on their accents and seemed truly chuffed when someone would reveal that they were in Brazil or Japan or somewhere that wasn’t the US or the UK. After the first week of live class lecture and live Q&A, I made the comment that the price of the workshop was worth it for all of this access to unfiltered Eno and while that was true for me, I also realized that this was an opportunity I might never get again and that I didn’t know what I might get out of trying to write songs so I might as well give it a shot. They offered a music theory class and I couldn't do it right now, but I am thinking about doing one in the future. There's also a "home recording for musicians" which has nothing at all to do with my life but just seemed incredibly useful if you were someone who fit that description.
All of this started before January 20 and even before the inauguration, there were a lot of questions about making art while the world was burning, Unsurprisingly Eno's answer was "do it anyway" (paraphrase) and that "the only power we have is in community." If you've ever wanted to write songs (or do anything else creative), start today. Right now is all you have.
Caryn Rose
~ over on Radio Nowhere ~
