The wonderful Gotland retreat

Ffrom May 10 to May 18 I spent a most wonderful week at a songwriter's retreat in Sweden. I co-wrote some new songs, I learned from a true master of the craft, made a bunch of new friends and had myself a good time.

I'd heard of these retreats before and had been tempted to go but you know how it is, they cost money and if you don't know exactly what you're gonna get you may decide to spend it on something else. I'm really happy I won a stipend for half of the trip's costs in a competition. It ended up being an all-around great experience.
I arrived in Stockholm on Friday, May 8. Hooked up with my myspace buddy A.P. Meister. Had never met him before but we've been in touch for awhile and he graciously offered to put me up at his place. Had a wonderful time meeeting Andreas and his girlfriend Lova (isn't that a super cool name?).

We went to see Tom Paley on Friday night. He's an 82 year-old folk musician, former member of the New Lost City Ramblers who were a great influence on Dylan when he came to New York in the early 60ies. Paley played lots of folk tunes on guitar and banjo in a traditional style that not too many people play in anymore, very educational. He also gave me something to muse on by saying: "Folk musicians use themselves to present the song, pop musicians use the song to present themselves." I hear ya, Tom.
Met up with A.P. again on Saturday. He took me to a cool record store in town that had its own little compartment for my CDs next to Dolly Parton, Charley Patton, John Prine & Bruce Robison. Very cool. So I bought this new Bruce Robison compilation (His Greatest) and a Billy Joe Shaver live record.
A.P. ran off to a wedding and I hooked up with Daniel Hertzov who was also going on the songwriter retreat. We met in a café, strolled through old downtown Stockholm and went to see "Cadillac Records", a cool movie about Chess Records that was all about Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Chuck Berry & Etta James.
Got up early on Sunday morning for an entire day of traveling. No need to bore you with the details but the day got kinda long traveling via subway, bus, ferry, and another bus from Stockholm to Holmhällar on the beautiful Swedish island of Gotland. Along the way we picked up most of the fellow retreaters except for our Danish contingent. We were welcomed at Holmhällar by the retreat's organizing trio of Brett Perkins, an American songwriter transplanted to Denmark, Annika Fehling and and Eva Hillered, both Swedish singer-songwriter-sirens. I lucked out and got a single room/cabin. ("A little extra for the competition winner," Brett said. Yay.)
That first night all the 20 participants got together and everyone played a song to introduce themselves. You could tell there was a lot of musical talent in the room, some truly professional songwriters and musicians, some others who might not play tons of gigs but obviously have a real love for music & writing.
I did "The Things That Count" and was surprisingly nervous playing to a jury of my peers. Nashville songwriter Buddy Mondlock stood out as he would most every night during the week to come.

Day #1: Monday was really our first working day. Vocal practice in the morning with Eva Hillered, sharing circle with Annika Fehling - this is how we would start every day. The sharing circle would give each of us two minutes to share thoughts on "something new & good", self-appreciation and usually one other topic, for example "what's a challenge for you", "what do you appreciate about the person to your right", "...yourself as a songwriter", those kinds of things. Sometimes it got really emotional when people shared something about their past.
Then: work. Each day at aropund 11 am Brett would pair us with a different songwriting partner and give us an assignment that would work as a starting off point for the writing.
Monday's assignment was to free-associate for ten minutes on the line "Once in a while", then hook up with your co-writing partner, compare notes and hope for sparks to fly. I was very happy about being paired with Daniel since we'd already gotten acquainted.
We came up with a song called "It's About Time" that's got a cool chord progression and a real strong chorus. We're still emailing back & forth trying to finetune (or completely overhaul) our verses. I think we got encouraging feedback from Brett in that night's listening circle which is where we got together every night at 8 pm to play each other the day's work.
After the official listening circle, people were still milling around and we got into an impromptu guitar pull that was extremely enjoyable. Buddy played his song "The Kid". Oh boy, what a gorgeous song.
Day #2, Tuesday: Our assignment on Tuesday was to venture out into the beautiful countryside with our little recording devices, record three rhythms and then get back together with your writing partner to play him or her what you found and see where that'd take you. I must admit, I'd been hoping for a rhythm-based assignment and really wanted to write a rumba (cause I'd been digging the opening number on the new Dylan record).
Things came out differently, though. My writing partner Klaus Caprani had an opening line "wind in the trees sings a song of long-lost memories" that jibed beautifully with a line I'd written down the day before "I'm open to the beauty of the moment". And that's the road we took with Klaus being a very sympathetic co-writer. I think Klaus will agree that I came up with most of the lyric that day. A few days ago, however, he mailed me with a killer suggestion: "Magic Of The Moment" rather than "Beauty Of The Moment". Alliteration is king.
Day #3: On Wednesday I got paired with Hanna Berglund, a 21-year-old extremely talented piano player & singer. She's a great gal but since she has a very different musical background this promised to be an interesting collaboration. We wrote a duet in 3/4 that we got some great feedback on. People liked the blending of our voices. Since this is a little different for both of us, we may only ever play it together. I wonder when the next time will be.
Day #4: Thursday's assignment was to write a storysong with two main characters. I pretty much consider storysongs my bread & butter and I already have a few written for the next record so I wasn't too stoked about this assignment. Very stoked, however, to get to write with Eva Hillered. We talked for awhile about a possible avenue for our story. We thought it would be interesting to write about a real-life person and wondered who we might choose. After quite a bit of theorizing, we came up with a few lines about a certain female movie star (I don't want to give it all away here, sorry, folks). I had a little bluesy lick, though, that didn't fit our story so Eva came up with a very different musical setting (I would've leaned toward re-writing the lyric rather than the music). Eva really is melody lady! After getting some feedback about what worked and what didn't in our lyric, we stayed up until 1.30 that night to re-write.
Day #5: Due to an uneven number of participants that day (some folks were sick), I got paired in a three-way with jazz guitar and vocab virtuoso Andy Fite and Anders ... (I never did find out his last name). Our assignment was to go on a 20-minute-walk and not say a word and see what that would trigger. I have to admit I was a little tired that day and maybe intimidated by the thought of working with a guitar genius like Andy. Talking about Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind over lunch led us down a silly path. By the time we met at my cabin after lunch, I already had half a stupid storysong. Andy was game to jump aboard "the Markus train" as he called it. I'm not sure whether Anders felt steamrolled. Anyway, we laughed our asses off over what we thought was a very funny song. Before we presented the song on Saturday morning, there was a concert on Friday night.
And I was a busy boy because all four of my songs I'd written so far were going in the program. I think I did ok for the most part, considering. But mostly I was surprised about the great songs that had come up during the week. Hearing those songs in a row was simply astounding.
I have a hard time picking a favorite. Pretty much every song that Buddy was involved in (particularly the co-writes w/ Eva & Annika) was stellar. Andy & Maria Steen wrote the retreat's theme song, a beautiful heart-warming number called "Life Is Beautiful".
Day #6: On Saturday morning we reconvened for the listening circle and our attempt at a funny song didn't go over that well. Some folks were downright offended. Hm.
Since this was officially an off-day, Annika Fehling and I had agreed to try to write something on Saturday. I think we came up with an amazingly beautiful song that I certainly could not have written on my own. The beauty of co-writing. We had another concert on Saturday evening that went well and then a wonderful farewell party at night. Annika and I retreated from the party to spend some more time on our song and then went back to play it for everyone.
Andy and I also felt the time was right and the atmosphere loose enough to present our "funny song" again. This time it went over much better, some people even laughed :-)

I can't put into words what a wonderful time I had with everybody on the retreat.
Day #7: Another day of traveling ... but the impromptu jam with maestro Andy Fite, Daniel Hertzov, Anouschka, Arnd Hofmann and Hanna Berglund on the bus to Stockholm was a great ending to this trip.
You'll certainly be hearing those songs in upcoming concerts! (Some of them are still being finetuned in most interesting email co-write sessions.)