Song writng with Tanya

Well, it all started with my Mum writing a beautiful poem on the end of one of her aerogram letters 30 years ago... in fact on November 1st 1994.

Then I signed up for a Song writing workshop through the Festival of Voices in July 2024 in Hobart where we were invited to create a song from a poem if you brought one.
And oh yes, this was a wonderful ‘Mavis poem’ (that I read out loud at my first wedding in Prague, but that’s another story).

The workshop was a disaster when nine people turned up earnestly, each with a poem and they had allocated only an hour. So, I missed out. And I sulked.

Coming back to Sydney I re-joined the choir, Another Roadside Attraction that I have sung with for over twenty years and tentatively asked Tanya if I could pay her to help me write something together. I showed her old photos of Mum on the Bridgewater canal in the north of England, the backdrop for her poem.

The first few sessions I was too hung up on honouring my mothers’ words (as you’ve guessed by now) I really loved my Mum. And whenever I was back home for big chunks of time, we would walk along the canal close to her house to give Mum and me time out from my ill father, yarn, walk the dog, maybe even post a letter on the corner by the humped back bridge and just enjoy being together. Through all of the seasons we did this.

So, Tanya got me top pick out twenty words, to think of a colour, a texture maybe or a colour for phrases or parts of my Mums poem. As an Art psychotherapist this was so down my alley. At first it was tricky but the more I delved and tinkered on my crappy keyboard upstairs in my art studio the ‘more colourful’ my song became.

At one point a[er three sessions, I went back to Mums original handwritten poem and saw that I had missed out one crucial line “While you aren’t here” when I took my typewritten poem to Tasmania months earlier.

Blimey.

I collaged the working drawings of the sheet music with imagery from the canal, blown up and re-sized to play around with the theme... “While you aren’t here”.
Playing around with enlarging and reducing I even then chose a piece of the canal that Mum actually was cut off... only her faithful labrador, Merry was along the canal bank.

“While you aren’t here”.

And yet I still continued. A few glasses of wine helped and then I started playing around with echoes of certain phrases.

When Tanya would send through the sheet music of my bad voice memos it was really magical to see it and then be able to play it back, wondering about harmonies and even chords. Later sang beside her and working out timings of the notes... and then wondering whether it was better before.

Such a lovely organic process that I am so grateful to Tanya for giving so generously. I really value our musical process together. An honouring of Mums words, sentiment and musicality thrown in.

Mavis would be chuffed to bits. Now what to call it.