Claire Wineman
Contributing Writer
Being a student at Wooster provides plenty of songwriting material: how many times you’ve eaten cereal in Lowry this week, the deeply philosophical questions posed in class or how cute the black squirrels look in the freezing snow.
For many people on campus though, songwriting already provides one of the best mediums for sorting through their lives — both the trivial and the difficult parts of every day.
According to Jeremy Smucker ’19, “Music is a great combination of both therapy and expression, and a special art form because it connects really quickly to people. When you hear something climactic in a symphony or pop song or folk tune, you feel it in your bones and get goosebumps. I’m attracted to that and want to do it myself.”
Smucker’s lifelong interest in writing songs led him to create Wooster’s new Songwriting Club, which had its first meeting on Saturday, Feb. 10. The club has already attracted students with interests in a variety of genres — everything from folk to electronic music — and included representatives from a wide range of experience levels. Some people had never written music to go with their lyrics, while others struggled with writing words. The mix of students lends well to Smucker’s goal for the club, which emphasizes the process behind songwriting rather than the final product.
“Songwriting is a discipline where it’s really easy to get in your own personal hole and spend lots of hours in your bedroom not talking to anybody, trying to create something that you like, which is really hard to do,” he said. “Creating a club like this allows people — in a very Wooster way — to collaborate with others but do their own independent art.”
Jonathan Guez, a professor of music theory at the College and the faculty advisor for the new club, sees the organization as an opportunity for students to overcome some of the obstacles that plague young songwriters, especially the desire to create a perfect composition from the beginning.
“The process of writing a song should be the process of trying to make it better. The worst thing you can possibly do is have it crystallize as an object that’s protected from revision. The worst imaginable thing is that that object somehow becomes protected from revision. Take it apart, break it, try it with this, take the chorus out and put a new chorus in and feel it with all these different options! Don’t think of that utterance as being unalterable.” Guez said.
For now, the club plans to hold three-part meetings: sharing group members’ songs, learning about and discussing some aspect of songwriting and the presentation of an interesting new prompt for everyone to write to before the next meeting.
“Jeremy said something yesterday about how this will be a no-judge place, and I think that’s what it needs to be and that’s wonderful, but I would qualify that a tiny bit by saying this, ideally for me, if I were a part of it, I would want to come in there and have somebody say, ‘Look, that could be better. Maybe you could do this or could do that,’” Guez said.
The activities are open-ended to play to everyone’s interests, while still creating a sense of camaraderie in the common experience of songwriting; nothing beats creating a song alone in your bedroom, but time spent going through the process with others may very well be a close second.