My Songwriting Workshops Origin-Story
My first Songwriting Workshop of the year is taking place on Saturday, 1/25 in NYC. Read on for more info...
Introduction
Dear Reader,
Today I’ll be explaining the origin story of my pride and joy, the one thing in my life right now that absolutely lights my soul on fire in a way that no other thing does—my songwriting workshops.
It still feels surreal to even say to people that I host songwriting workshops in New York City, that I am a songwriter, that I do this and I love it and I host these sessions and people—the most amazing, interesting, creative, visionary people—actually come to them.
And guess what? My first Songwriting Workshop of the year will take place this Saturday, January 25th, at the brand new Verci location in Flatiron, at 2pm. Be there. It’s going to be epic.
And, what’s more…
At this Saturday’s workshop, I will be making an announcement about my songwriting workshop series that makes me want to crawl underneath the table and explode and die, but in a joyful, exciting, euphoric way. You know how some dogs get so excited that they jump and hide underneath the table and pee because their emotions are so big that they start to malfunction. That’s me.
I am so, deeply grateful that I get to do this. Thank you for being along on this journey with me.
If you’d like to get emails about my upcoming Songwriting workshops and stay posted on what’s to come, be sure to subscribe to this email list (it’s free!), where I’ll be announcing all future sessions and keeping you up-to-date.
And in a future post that I plan to drop within the next few weeks or so, I’ll be rolling out more details regarding the announcement I’ll be making on Saturday, and the visions I have for the future of this workshop series.
Without further ado, let’s dive in.
Songwriting Workshops Origin-Story
I suppose that in order to tell my Songwriting Workshops origin story, I’m going to have to tell you how I got into songwriting in the first place, right?
Well, here it goes.
New Jersey, October 2020
In the fall of 2020 I was living at my parents house in New Jersey where I had no friends and had just begun another abysmal semester on Zoom, the third one in 6 months. I had taken classes straight through the summer without stopping —Calc III, French II, and Intro to Java, back to back to back. This semester was no better; Data Structures, Discrete Math, Physics, and some other horrible math class that I’m forgetting (I probably blacked it out of my memory as a trauma response). I tortured myself this way because I figured, I wasn’t having to pay for housing—might as well cram in as many college credits as I possibly could during this time, save a little money.
I was so depressed, that I downloaded Hinge.
• • •
My Formative High-School Years (2012-2016 ish)
Now. I had never used a dating app before, and I hated the idea of it. But, I was scared that all of this time at home not socializing was going to make me even more awkward and weird in front of boys than I already was, after I had already wasted my formative high school years as a total loner-loser who commuted alone into the city 6 days a week, whilst chasing my childhood dreams of becoming a ballerina.
That was four hours out of my day (two hours there, two hours back), for four, essential, social-development years. Four hours per day that kids my age usually spent gossiping and writing notes to their crush and slipping them inside of lockers and giggling and slathering on cheap cherry-vanilla Victoria’s Secret lipgloss and smacking their lips in front of pink magnetic locker-mirrors from Target and kissing boys in hallways (if you were cool) and going to football games and smoking weed for the first time outside of a Seven Eleven.
I, instead, at aged sixteen and weighing about eighty-nine pounds, was riding the train with exhausted middle-aged commuters, dodging my Penn Station stalker, and falling asleep to the 2012 cast of Les Miserables blasting into my eardrums who scream-sang ONE DAY MORE! ONE MORE DAY FOR REVOLUTION WE SHALL NIP IT IN THE BUD ONE MORE DAY UNTIL SALVATION WE SHALL SOMETHING SOMETHING ONE DAY MORE! as I passed through “Elizabeth. Linden. Rahway. Woodbride. Perth Amboy. South Amboy. Aberdeen Matawan…” and all the other ones.
It wasn’t always Les Mis. Sometimes I listened to Frank Sinatra’s entire discography. Or Ella Fitzgerald’s. Or Amy Winehouse’s. Or Echosmith. Or Lorde. Basically, I was looking for other things to do in my life, besides ballet. I kind of sucked at social media, so that was a non-starter. Besides, I had no friends. No real ones, anyway. And so much of having friends back then was how cool you looked on social media. I had neither going for me. In the meantime, ballet was slowly destroying me from the inside out, but I was in so deep—giving up high school and all that—that I didn’t want to admit to myself that I was sick, that this lifestyle wasn’t healthy for me anymore.
So I turned to something I really loved to pass the time on my commutes—music.
Those artists I listened to every day. They became like, my friends. My only friends. I listened as to their words as if listening for encrypted coordinates that would lead me to the holy grail. I listened so deeply to these songs, that I felt compelled to look up the lyrics to every single one of them on Genius, and I read along as I listened, studying song-structures and sifting meticulously through the all lyrics to absorb the poetry and scavenger-hunt for hidden messages about what the artist was going through when they wrote the song.
My entire commute home, this is all I did—oftentimes almost missing my stop because I couldn’t fathom how eighteen-year-old Lorde had managed to write the poetry that was Ribs:
This dream isn’t feeling sweet
We’re reeling through the midnight streets
and I’ve never felt more alone
Feels so scary getting old
That was me on the trains! I felt so seen. My dreams— unfolding all around me, melting and withering away like a paper maché sculpture left out to dry, caught in the rain. Taking midnight trains—on long nights of rehearsals and avoiding all the methheads. Alone—alone as f*ck. Scared of getting old—a little girl trapped inside of a boyish late teenager’s body, my twenties creeping up on me like a beast in the dark who wanted to eat me alive, all eighty-nine pounds of tender flesh and bone.
And Amy Winehouse—the vocal gymnastics she was capable of. Those riffs…
yao shraahhg, and et’s the wah-urrst
Who trah-u-lay stuck the knife—eh-eh-in-furst
ah cheat-ad muh-sEH-elf
…like i knew
…toldjuhhh!!!
• • •
New Jersey, October 2020
Anyways, I’m getting so off topic. The point is, the obsession started there, on those train rides, when I should have been kissing boys and posting sexy teenaged thirst traps on Instagram like everyone else was.
But I didn’t. And when my first year of Columbia—aka my first year of normalcy, when I was just starting to talk to boys and just starting to go on a few dates here and there—was completely interrupted by Covid, it forced me to move back home, where I had never made any lasting friends growing up, and knew basically no one.
(Because remember? I was too busy spending all of my time in a ballet studio being an anorexic little weasel, torturing my mother, and nurturing my inflated sense of self).
And now, after 3 semesters of Zoom classes, I desperately, desperately needed to touch grass.
But I didn’t want to touch grass alone. I wanted friends, goddamit.
So (naturally.) I downloaded Hinge.
Now, I know that Hinge is not really a place where people go to uh, find friends. That’s not really why the app was designed. I am aware of that.
But, I figured, there had to be more people out there—not just me—who were in the throes of a similar Covid-era pickle. People who had other plans, and then Covid swooped in to unexpectedly ruin their lives, and now they needed someone to talk to. They needed a pal.
I stated my intentions clearly in my Hinge bio:
not actually looking for someone to date lol. lonely af. literally just want friends.
And that is how I met Kyle.
• • •
Kyle and I are friends to this day. I haven’t heard from him and a while, but I’m sure he’s doing great. (I should reach out soon.) He’s one of those amazing people who just kind of floats in and out of your life every once in a while, like a time traveler who is always in transit to his next adventure, like a shooting star on its way across the galaxy.
Anyways, Kyle and I met one, singular time during Covid. Two, actually, if you count the thirty-second visit I paid to his house when I came to pick up the keyboard that he offered to loan to me, until further notice.
(As I would later come to learn that he was randomly moving to Boston, and was looking to give it away.)
(But of course, I knew none of that walking into our first meeting.)
Over text, we set a date to meet—platonically.
My boundaries, in accordance with the way I had outlined them in my Hinge bio, and re-iterated them multiple times over text, were stringently clear. I made sure of it. Still, I hoped to God he wasn’t a crazy person who was going to murder me. But, I was also so depressed at the time that I don’t even think I would have minded if he did.
Still, I was nervous. What am I thinking, I wondered, parking my car.
Kyle was a musician—he looked it. He played all the instruments and had crazy hair. As soon as I saw him as he making his way towards me where I was stationed on a park bench, recognizing him from the pictures, I knew I liked him. He just had a quality. A dorkiness. A warmth.
We spent a lovely afternoon in the park, talking about life and art and philosophy and the bizarreness of Covid. He was someone who I immediately felt comfortable telling all my dreams to, unafraid of him finding them insane or lame or dumb or disproportionate.
Which is what brought us to the topic of music.
I think I’d like to write songs someday, I said casually, hardly recognizing the words as they escaped from my mouth, like tiny little beings who had been living inside of me all this time, who I never even knew were in there until I suddenly felt them climbing over my tongue, past my lips, heard them pouring out of mouth, and felt them suspended in the air around us. And yet I had spoken this sentence as if this was the most normal thing I had ever said in my life.
Kyle smiled. You should, he said, without thinking twice about it, without saying something like, What would give you that idea? You don’t even play an instrument.
What genre do you think you would write for? he continued.
I heard myself describing the music I imagined making— music that didn’t exist yet, describing it like describing a made-up flower from a species of magical flowers native to a mystical fairy forest that only existed inside of my brain.
Kyle nodded and listened as I described my imaginary music to him, as if he could hear it in the air around us, as if he knew what I meant. Absurd, if you think about it. But also beautiful. I felt seen.
Gee, I thought, as he smiled back at me, looking like he was about to say something. I’m so excited to meet this new friend who I feel like I’ve known forever.
And then Kyle invited me to his going-away party.
Going away party? I asked. Where are you going?
I’m moving to Boston! he said, beaming. My friends and I are going to form a band and make music out there.
My heart sank. It felt like a butterfly had landed on my nose for a moment, and then it flapped its wings and left.
Oh! I stammered. That’s great!
Yeah, I’m really excited about it, he nodded. I could tell he really was. He gazed far off across the river where the sun was now setting, piercing the purple clouds with visions of the new life he’d soon have. I felt happy for him.
And a little sad for me.
You know, you should something something something, Kyle said, breaking my trance.
What? I hadn’t heard or processed a word he just said.
I said, you should take my keyboard while I’m gone. I’m ordering a new one when I get there. You want it? he asked.
I blinked back, stunned. I felt like a piano had fallen out of the sky and landed on my head.
And that’s how I got my keyboard and started writing songs.
• • •
New York, Summer 2022 - January 2024
Like I mentioned earlier, social media was never really my thing. I was never really good at it. I tried, I did. You would think that as a creative person this would come easy for me. It never really has. I could never get into a groove with it. And after years of feeling completely invisible and irrelevant to every algorithm ever—IG, TikTok, all the things—I simply stopped caring.
So I started sharing what I cared about, what I loved most—my songs.
After Kyle gave me his keyboard, I became obsessed with writing songs. Obsessed, I tell you. Turns out, it was in me all along. I could hear songs in my head first and plunk around on the keyboard until I found the right chords. The lyrics flowed. I churned out about a hundred of them in that first year, scribbling them into a yellow spiral notebook until I needed a new notebook—a teal one this time, with an elastic band to keep all of the pages in. I took the thing everywhere. It sloshed around at the bottom of my bag wherever I went, ready to be grabbed and ripped open and scribbled into at any given moment.
And then I took a songwriting class at Columbia, the first summer I was back. And then, the following semester, an independent study with the Head of the Music Department, Peter Susser, just “Susser”, or “Peter” to most. A legendary character of a man who spoke fast, was (clearly) raised in the theater, once lent his cello to YoYo Ma in the 60’s (…70’s? 80’s?) and liked to talk about his dog.
Everybody loved Peter. He adored me. I adored him.
My last meeting with Peter was the final class of my final semester at Columbia. He sat me down across from him in his beautiful disaster of an office—stuff everywhere— “Come in, come in”—and asked me what I was doing next.
I swallowed.
“I don’t know yet,” I said, weakly. I wrung my hands. I felt small and ashamed to admit to Peter that I didn’t have a job lined up.
But I also felt like that didn’t really matter to him.
“Here’s what you do,” he said. I sat up. Attentive. Like he was about to speak a prophecy to me.
“You’ve gotta find other musicians. Collaborators. Work with them. Learn from them. Produce your own work. As much of it as you can. As much of it as you can do? You do. The stuff you can’t do? You find other people who can help you. Ok? Take those voice lessons. Your annunciation—work on it. Call this number—she’s good. Get your work out there kiddo. And thank me when you get there.” He winked.
“Close the door behind you when you leave.”
And just like that, with Peter’s blessing, I was done with college, and about to enter the real world.
• • •
I entered a six month stretch of post-grad unemployment. The bad news was, it sucked. The good news was, I wrote and wrote and wrote. I was writing songs every single day. It was the only thing I looked forward to every day after hours and hours and hours of applying to jobs that I knew I’d probably never hear back from. Every Monday, I took the train up to the Bronx for lessons with the vocal coach Peter had recommended. But the lessons were expensive. I taught ballet and nanny-ed extra shifts to pay for them.
In the meantime, Peter’s voice echoed in my eardrums. “You’ve gotta find other musicians. Collaborators. Work with them. Learn from them.”
How the hell was I going to do that?
I discovered my passion for music kind of late in life. Most of my friends were not actually musicians. I had made some friends in the songwriting class—I reached out to them, hopeful. But they were all kinda busy with their own stuff. I thought about going to shows all by myself, to connect with fellow musicians, but I was even too poor to buy tickets, and I felt vulnerable going alone. I got desperate. Started looking things up.
I met Daniel one night—extremely similar to the Kyle situation, actually— after downloading some weird music-Hinge sorta-app (lol), meaning, meaning…that it was an app that’s supposed to help you find bandmates, but I (quickly) learned that a lot of sadboi artsy-loser typa guys on there use it as a sort-of creepy music-Tinder.
But not Daniel. He was the very first person I connected with on the app. We made a plan immediately to meet later in the week—for a sort of interview, I suppose—to see if we were compatible as bandmates. (The way the app was intended to be used.) We exchanged numbers.
An hour later Daniel texted me.
Wanna meet tonight instead? I got a free ticket to an AFI concert at Terminal 5 if you wanna come.
I gulped. yolo.
A few hours later I was on the subway alone in a cool outfit heading to Terminal 5, thinking, please don’t be a murderer, please don’t be a murderer, please don’t be a murderer. I tried to be present. I was having second thoughts. I didn’t look at my phone. I figured, these might be the last moments of my life. Better enjoy them.
I started a conversation with the girl next to me on the Subway. Or, maybe she with me. The point is, if I was on my phone the whole time, I would never have met this girl.
I’m meeting someone for the first time, she said. I’m kind of nervous. She had a wide, warm smile.
Me too! I said. Huh. What were the odds.
And don’t be. You look stunning!
Turned out we were heading in the same direction. We agreed to form a sort of alliance, to walk together. I don’t remember if she walked me all the way there, or if she just so happened to be going to the same concert, all I know is that we got off at the same stop and walked most of the way to Terminal 5 together.
I remember enjoying her company. That it gave me a boost. If I remember correctly, it was raining and we shared an umbrella. Maybe if I hadn’t met that girl that night, I would have chickened out and turned around and gone home. But something about randomly making a friend on the 1 train on my way to go meet a complete stranger made me feel like everything was going to be ok.
I arrived at Terminal 5 with my really good outfit. Rihanna was in my ear all, she can beat me, but she can NOT beat my outfit. I thought to myself, if I die tonight and they find my body floating in the Hudson river, at least I’ll look f*cking good. Like a metropolitan Ophelia.
But as I met Daniel’s eyes in the lobby of Terminal 5 for the first time, it felt like fate. Like I recognized him already. Like we already knew each other, like we’d always known each other.
And it’s been that way ever since.
• • •
And so Daniel and I began working together every week. I showed him my songs, he showed me his songs. He had the patience of a saint as I sat there explaining melodies to him that I didn’t even quite have the vocabulary to articulate. I knew absolutely nothing about music theory and scales and all of the stuff that you’re supposed to know. I was just winging it. All of it. I confided in Daniel about the cringe origin-stories of my songs, sounding insane and unhinged. We got a groove going. It was epic.
Finally, I was hired by a large magazine conglomerate in the Spring. (I'll talk about that some other time.) In the meantime, I continued to write songs. I would come home every day and write more songs. I wrote on the train. In an open tab on my work computer. I took bathroom breaks to hum melodies into my phone, which would pop into my mind randomly, while printing out papers, typing an email. It were as if I was experiencing frequent visitations by a friendly musical ghost who followed me around and always had new ideas that she wanted to share with me.
One day, a very cool mutual friend of mutual friends of mine from school, whom I didn’t know very well, but whom I had always admired from a distance, for her creativity, her taste in music and art—lots of reasons— responded to one of my Instagram stories.
Dude, I love this song! You should come to Spotify and jam with me sometime! (She worked at Spotify as a Product Designer.)
I was floored.
girl. actually tho??? I would die.
Yes, come! she insisted.
Can I bring my guitarist friend, Daniel? I asked.
Bring him!
And thus began our Spotify Jams group. Within a month or so, our group grew to five. We met every week on a Friday, sometimes a Saturday, and spent 3-4 hours in a circle, tossing ideas around, sharing unfinished work, screaming into the microphone (Bjork/Yoko Ono-style), exploding into fits of laughter. It was amazing. The most joy a person could experience, packed into a dense three hours.
• • •
New York, February 2024-July 2024
In February of 2024, I went with my Spotify friend—at this point one of my dearest, most treasured friends—to a one-man-show performance that her virtuoso friend was hosting at a venue on St. Mark’s. This friend of hers was none other than the wickedly talented New York City jazz-house fixture, Pedram.
(The same Pedram I collaborated with on my song The Countryside of Italy, an excerpt of which was featured on my last post. )
Of course, the concert was immaculate. There was an electricity in the room bringing everyone together. The people were cool. The vibes were great.
It was at this concert where I met Kathleen, fellow musician and soon-to-be collaborator.
Kathleen and I vibed right away. We bonded over music and mutual friends. She told me that she worked at Warner music and was a member of this cool creative co-working maker-space in SoHo, a place called “Verci”.
Verci. I had heard of this place before. I had seen ads for it on Instagram. And in fact, it wasn’t the first time I was hearing about it on this night. I had just heard someone else mention it. And another person. And another person before that. Verci. Verci. Verci.
Kathleen and her friend Josh had started Studio Jams at Verci, an open-jam session for established and aspiring musicians to come and do just that —jam.
You should come to one of our jams, Kathleen offered. We’re having one in March.
I had just told Kathleen about our Spotify Jams group. I asked her if they could come, too.
Bring them! She said.
• • •
In March, or maybe it was April, I showed up at Verci with my Spotify friends and my songwriting notebook sloshing around in the bottom of my bag, as always. The elevators dinged, and opened, and it was an immediately yes-moment—Gigantic windows with potted plants growing in front of them, soaking up the sunlight. Lofty-SoHo ceilings. Cozy living room vibes. Eclectic adults with big imaginations floating around the space in colorful, strange outfits, doing things, making things. I felt like I had just walked into a doctor Seuss book—you know how Dr. Seuss just makes sh*t up and you have no idea what you’re looking at or what he’s really talking about half the time but you kind of just go with it because it rhymes and it all makes sense somehow. That’s what it felt like walking into Verci for the very first time.
My friends and I greeted Kathleen as we walked in, I introduced her to the girls I had brought. Kathleen gave us all hugs and invited us to take a seat in the circle, on red and purple cushions, next to big banana-leaf plants. We sat there comfortably, soaking in the energy of the space, and waited for the session to begin. I yanked my notebook out of my bag and immediately got to work—hmm…what song am I going to share with the group? I wondered, tapping my pen to my chin, leafing through my pages.
The jam was structured similar to our Spotify Jams, but with a larger group of people. It was a little bit awkward at first, because my Spotify group and I were new to the space, and lots of people there were already members. But as soon as we did intros and started jamming, we all sort of sank into it, one big mesh of harmonious sound, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
This is what I want to do every day forever, I thought.
• • •
That summer was sort of quiet. The Spotify Jams group split into different directions, periodically—who was on vacation, who was doing an internship, who was visiting family back home for a while. The point is, hardly any of my music friends were going to be in town for my birthday. Of course I understood. But of course, I was a little sad about it.
I was used to this. I grew up with a summer birthday that went unacknowledged time and time again at school. And as a kid who grew up lonely to begin with (and yes, it was almost entirely self-inflicted, but still), this was kind of a sore spot for me.
fskaljfldksajd it’s fine! I told myself. Jesus Christ I’m so dramatic.
I looked at the calendar. My birthday was falling on a Saturday, this year.
And then a lightbulb went off.
Studio Jams was on a Saturday back in April, I thought to myself. I could think of no better way to spend my birthday than by making music with people. Maybe they’ll be having one again!
I texted Kathleen.
Hi Kathleen! Any chance you’ll be having a Studio Jams on Saturday, July 20th? I asked.
hi Sofia!! <3 no we don’t have one scheduled, but would you want to host a Songwriting Workshop that day??
Me? Host a workshop? Me?
I felt like a piano had fallen out of the sky and landed on my head. Again.
I had no idea why Kathleen had asked me of all people. But I wasn’t going to ask any questions about it.
I’d love to!!!!!!
And that, my friends, is the story of how I got started hosting my Songwriting Workshops.
• • •
Epilogue.
And so, as you can see, I am literally just a girl who really really loves to make music more than anything else in the world, that I literally have spent an entire Monday writing all about it. Yes, it did take me an entire day write this. A day off, I might add. Indeed, this is the way I chose to spend my day off—recounting the saga of how I got started hosting Songwriting Workshops (nerd).
And as I wrap this up I’m like, Why on Earth did I just spend so much time writing about all of this? Does anyone even care to hear this long-winded story? I mean, after all, I am just getting started. I’m just on the brink. I haven’t even been at this thing a full year yet.
But, as you can see, it hasn’t been, really. It’s actually been years in the making. And in the months that I’ve been actively hosting these workshops, the group has grown from five people. To twelve. To twenty. To nearly thirty wonderful creatives at the last one—poets, instrumentalists, established artists, closeted artists, first-timers— each of whom chose to spend their entire Saturday afternoon with me, with us— creating, sharing, expressing ideas, acting on them, making friends, fostering new opportunities, new journeys, exploring new creative pathways.
Moving forward, I have made it my personal self-appointed mission to create even more opportunities for this community, passing the torch in the same way that so many have done for me—Kyle, Daniel, Peter, Marieke, Kathleen, Josh, Anant, Ami.
As a result, here are the developments you can expect to see in the coming months…
I will be hosting these workshops twice a month, instead of just once a month. Some at Verci, possibly some at other venues throughout the city. Subscribe for announcements.
New activities—I’ve been brainstorming all kinds of new workshop exercises. I have loads of ideas I’d like to test out moving forward. I’ll be detailing them in a future post.
Performance opportunities? Stay tuned...
As hinted, I am extremely excited to announce that I am presently working on developing a performance series, a recital of sorts—the very coolest sort of recital, I might add— intended for the artists who have joined me at my sessions to have the unique opportunity to get to share their work in an intimate concert-style setting. More on this to come—Subscribe to this email list to stay updated. And reach out to express interest in performing!
I guess in the end, the reason I’ve chosen to write about this is because I am proud. I am proud of what I am building, and I am proud to do what I love, and I am proud and grateful to share this part of myself with people—the most incredible, wonderful people—people who care, and who listen, and who are open, and generous, and who appreciate the work that I do—and I hope that people will see themselves in my journey— with all of its struggles, and triumphs, and wonders, and will see themselves in this community—this godsend group of people who have helped me to create this project that I am building and nurturing, and I hope that any new, potential members out there will not be shy, and will come forward with their creativity and feel compelled to join us, for all the same reasons that have driven me to develop this community in the first place.
Thank you for being a part of this journey with me, and for being the vast and wonderful group of people that you are with whom I can share these joys.
I hope you will join us at our new location this Saturday, January 25th, at the brand new Verci location in Flatiron, at 2pm. Here’s the RSVP Link:
I can’t wait to see you there.
Your Friend,
Sofia Bianchi