Fireweed Songwriting Workshop

I’m just back from a songwriting workshop stuffed with guitars and those who play them. My son who went with me, also brought his d, b and f whistles but besides that, no other instruments attended. It was given by Fireweed which is a trio of three guys, Gary Raspberry, Rob Unger and Jamie Campbell, the first two teaching at Queen’s Ed, while Jamie’s in Perth, a nearby town people keep calling, ‘cute.’ There are so MANY online music groups named Fireweed. I was puzzled why they’d keep the name, that being the case.  I was able to find them, finally, by googling their hit, ‘Heaven’s Restaurant,’ which instantly reminded me of John Barlow, a dream poet in Toronto, also into UFO’s.

The song is based on a dream Jamie had, of sitting in a restaurant, obviously a diner, waiting in the lineup for Heaven. A girl he knew 20 years before comes and sits across from me, anxious about all her sins and how she probably won’t get in. Jamie, in the dream, in the song, tells her not to worry because there’s an open window at the back. He says he’s gotten a lot of flack from people who condemn him for talking about the window. But I believe, as he does, that the window is there. The chorus is all guilt, a really good song, some of it, acapello. Don’t know how long they’ve been a group. but they’re very good. Hard to believe they’re local. Seemed like a young Kingston Trio to me.

The first half of the workshop was writing song lyrics, something I’ve been doing for about 12 years. Sitting side by side and not looking at each others work, both my son and I wrote about dragons in a quick lyric bit that involved listening to a tune several times and then composing. Small wonder, given our lives, that we chose monsters.

All three of Fireweed were leaders, jumping in where they felt they could add a bit, a most trusting and amazing process. Each man has his specialities bu they obviously love the writing part, individually and collectively.

The second half was the instrumentation. for a quickie seminar on the sport. This was fantastic. You actually got down in the muck, wrote and produced a song at the end of the thing. In collaboration, of course. My son, who is working with the bottom ranks of offenders said he thought one of the attendees was fresh out of the joint with prison tattos, wounds from a bar fight the night before and a broken nose. You have to admire his guts, coming on campus without knowing anyone and finding a place in all this. The rest were mostly music majors, some lovely voices, working hard as there were only a couple short stopping places in this splendid stuff.

All of the trio were most approachable, able to be interrupted to answer countless questions as the day wore on, at all times good listeners and the kind of teachers you wish you’d had in school.
The writing aspect was useful and the whole thing, while exhausting, was worth a year’s tution rather than the ten bucks they charged the twelve of us. If you ever get such an opportunity. You’d think there’d be more of this sort of thing around, (well, probably none as good as this) but given all the music majors and writers infesting our two university town, Kingston remains a Very Conservative Small Place with decided preferences for What Is Allowed To Go On.
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