The Wall Street Journal Visits a Kidbilly Event
This week, the Wall Street Journal published an article about an event in which I guided a group of non-songwriters through the process of writing as a team building exercise at a corporate retreat. (You can check out the article here, which features some music and video as well.)
The activity was facilitated by Billy Kirsch of Kidbilly Music. Billy has built a pretty crazy business model, but it works: take a group of corporate employees who don't work in the music sphere, break them into groups, assign each group a professional songwriter, give them an hour to write a song about what they do, and then immediately have them (led by their songwriter) perform the songs on stage in front of each other in a "best song" competition.
I've done this with mortgage brokers, hematologists, software developers, farm equipment manufacturers...you name it. And it never fails to turn into something pretty amazing! It's a teambuilding exercise, but it also helps with branding - it develops language about their organization and the significance of what they do for a living - and helps create a psychologically safe space for authenticity and sharing. (In fact, an subset of these gigs even specializes in teaching Fortune 500 CEOs how to lead more effectively by immersing them in the collaborative songwriting experience.)
The first time I was invited to do one of these events about a decade ago, it felt absolutely terrifying. I mean, talk about PRESSURE...write a song in an hour with a room full of non-songwriters and then perform it publicly in a competition! Yikes!
But I said yes to the scary. And then I kept doing it over and over again until I stopped losing sleep about it the night before and made FRIENDS with the scary. And eventually, it made me pretty much fearless, which is actually the best gift I have ever given myself as a songwriter.
Also, doing these kinds of gigs has shown me that music is the closest thing we’ve got to the fountain of youth. What else could turn a room of bored, frustrated, and sometimes socially awkward adults into a joyful mess of shouting, dancing, completely uninhibited arms-linked-together kids in less than an hour, stone cold sober?
Maybe writing a song about hematology or cloud security doesn’t meet the traditional definition of the art to the Music Row purist, but when you do it right, it’s still - in the legendary words of Harlan Howard - “3 chords and the truth”. It’s grown me as a songwriter, inspired me as a human, and it’s also shown me the true financial value of my songwriting skills in the world outside our broken music business model that doesn’t.
I’ve shared a couple of songs written during these events with my Ko-fi club. Click here and scroll to the bottom of the “From Farmers to Forensic Engineers” post to hear them.