I have a practice as a recording and performing singer/songwriter, as well as an arts-based research practice in evocative autoethnography and performance. Inspired by evocative autoethnographic writing and performance in which arts-based researchers engage with societal issues through the lens of their own experience (Carless and Douglas 2009; Carless 2017; 2022; Douglas 2019), I explore personal and collaborative songwriting in the context of experiencing environmental impact.
My personal songwriting practice relates to the field of confessional songwriting, in which songwriters write songs that may involve elements of personal experience as exemplified in the singer-songwriter genre of the 1970s and the works of artists such as Bruce Springsteen or Tracy Chapman. The process of songwriting may also teach the songwriter something about certain issues or experiences that they did not know before they wrote the song, as explained by the singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier (2021). In my practice, I navigate by ‘feeling ways of awareness’ (Blumenfeld-Jones 2016: 322), having to do with how emotional responses to situations create prompts that start the songwriting and create stimuli in the process, while navigating the process from an open, trusting, and sharing phenomenological position through a form of ‘naïve’ emotional honesty.
In my doctoral work, now completed (Høybye 2023), I developed a protocol for co-writing songs with non-songwriters. Many professional songwriters find that conversations that happen in connection with co-writing are often rich in content (Bennett 2013; 2016), and my hypothesis was that this would also be the case if I invited non-songwriters to co-write with me. I engaged in collaborative songwriting sessions to generate songs that responded to the sense of living with anthropogenic environmental impact. Songs were written using words from the jotted notes of our give-and-take-conversations combined with a melody game in which my co-writer would cast dice across the keys of a simple glockenspiel to randomly create stimuli for our melody. After finishing the song, I would revisit the transcript of the conversation and write about the processes of the songwriting encounter using both descriptive prose and evocative autoethnography.
At the time of 3WI project, the empirical part of my doctoral work was done, and thirty-three songs had been written. (Ten of the project songs have since been collected as an album, Songs in the Key of Collaboration, 2024.) I was therefore working through how to engage with the quite substantial amount of documentation produced in the songwriting encounters of my doctoral project. During 3WI, I developed a different song with each of the project partners. With Marie, I worked on a song about the process of songwriting (‘Song To Be Born’). This enabled me to gauge salient qualities of my personal songwriting practice phenomenologically, which was helpful when I came to articulate my approach to personal songwriting in discursive text. With Alan, I worked on a song envisioned as an opener for a live set of co-written songs from my PhD work (‘Song To Open’).