American roots music singer and songwriter Martha Redbone gestured to herself, “The twenty year-old me was not this. This right here is a product of mistakes and therapy.” Eighteen UC Berkeley students, ranging from undergraduates to PhD candidates, listened to Redbone attentively. Their chairs formed a semicircle, gathered for a songwriting workshop offered by Redbone and her longtime collaborator and bandmate Aaron Whitby. Coupled with her recent residence with Cal Performances, the workshop was based on the idea of a songwriting haiku: not a single word wasted, every word has meaning.
In her own practice, Redbone draws on her southeastern multicultural heritage. She crafts uplifting songs that celebrate the human spirit, infused with the folk and blues sounds of her childhood in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky. Since 2016, Redbone has been considering what it means to be erased – as someone hailing from the South, as a multicultural individual, as a woman. She instructed workshop participants to “Remember where you come from, remember that everything in your culture is part of what’s inspiring you.” Redbone shared that, “Incorporating one’s own culture into the music is my pushback against erasure.”
The workshop gave students an opportunity to be seen by Redbone, a professional musician who stated that “when you’re an artist, you have to get used to the word ‘NO’.” In response to a student asking how one gets to the point of trusting oneself as an artist, Redbone’s bandmate and collaborator Whitby offered, “As artists, we’re all struggling with the question of whether we’re good enough… With 7 billion of us in the world – If I like it, someone else probably also shares my taste.” Over the course of the workshop Redbone and Whitby emphasized the importance of practice, stating that creativity and confidence are muscles that artists must keep using to develop, they are not finite and will be strengthened over time. Redbone admitted in regards to her creative endeavours, “I either win or I learn. So I’ve been learning a lot, haha!”
One of the most poignant moments of the workshop was when undergraduate student Chloe Bauer inquired about how to set a poem to a melody when the poem lacks rhyme. Redbone responded, “Sing your poem to yourself over and over again out loud and try different melodies, eventually something will end up feeling the way that you are imagining.” Then Redbone asked Bauer if she had a poem she’d been working on that she’d be struggling to set to a melody. This turned into a spontaneous moment of play as Bauer shared her poem Spring Becomes Her, a sharp flower-filled poem on revenge. Whitby began playing the piano, offering up melodies, as Redbone sang the lyrics first softly, then more surely as she became familiar with the student’s words. Her voice radiated out to all in the room, comforting and sonically undeniable, providing Bauer with a uniquely new understanding of her poem.
There is something deeply moving about live music and song in a small room. It is almost transcendental to hear the human voice as a pure instrument for art. Redbone and Whitby’s presence and wisdom was inspiring and warm. A few days after the workshop, Curtis Hu, a Junior Physics Major, shared “One little saying that stuck with me was that we should lean into who we are. Everyone tells you that you’ll sound like this or that, but you should really listen deeply and try to sound like yourself, whatever that ends up being.”
Martha Redbone Songwriting Workshop was presented as a collaboration between Cal Performances as part of its Illuminations programming this season, the Department of Music, and the Arts Research Center with support by the Dean's Office of the Division of Arts & Humanities. More info
