These past months, I’ve been back at work with the people of Carnegie Hall’s Weill Program, performing community service which took us (Chris Washburne and the SYOTOS band) into a juvenile detention center in Brooklyn for another songwriting workshop. Although it was a completely different experience with a completely new set of challenges, once again, the resulting songs were pretty incredible, written by kids 12-16. We got to spend a good amount of time with these kids and it was as much a learning experience for us to live in their world and get to understand their situations as it was for them to learn about songwriting, collaboration and working with live musicians. It’s amazing what’s inside people who have no experience writing songs or music, once you can draw it out of them. I’d really like to credit Chris Washburne and Claudette Sierra for doing a great job under difficult circumstances.
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