Songwriters in Seattle

Tag: mashup

  • Mystery Matchup

    The Mystery Matchup is an online collaboration where an anonymous donor posts a piece of music or set of lyrics, and others are invited to complete the song by adding the missing portion.

    This activity is designed to inspire creativity and foster community. As such, the posted content should be respected, but modified as necessary to fit your contribution. After you submit your version of the completed song, the original poster will review all submissions and choose one or more to share for all to hear.

    How it works

    At the beginning of the event, the poster will be anonymous. All submissions will be forwarded in as anonymous fashion as possible. After the poster chooses a favorite response, the end result will be published along with the identities of all who were involved.

    Because the identities are not revealed until after the collaboration process is complete, the contributing authors will not be limited by preconceived notions based upon identity, such as anticipated style or content limitations. It is our hope that people will be pleasantly surprised by the identities of collaborators. 

    Do you want to collaborate?

    In order to keep this going, we need others who wish to post their ideas for collaboration. If you have a set of lyrics or piece of music that is looking for collaborative content, please email us at collaboration@songwritersinseattle.com

     


    Event Schedule

    Event Date Type Status
    Mystery Matchup #1:  4/5/20 – 4/19/20    Music seeking Lyrics    Open for submissions
    Mystery Matchup #2:  4/7/20 – 4/21/20    Lyrics seeking Music    Open for submissions

     

    To be clear, there is no need to RSVP for these events, just submit your collaboration at collaboration@songwritersinseattle.com anytime within the two week period that it is open for submissions.

     

    Submissions

    Send all submissions to collaboration@songwritersinseattle.com

     

     

  • Mystery Matchup #1

    This piece of music has been submitted as a chart with accompanying audio.

    The deadline for this activity is Sunday, April 19th, 2020 at 7:00 PM

    Chart: Mystery_Matchup_1
    (If you right click, you can open in another window or tab so that you can see the chart while listening to the music on this page)

    Audio: (Click three dots to the right to download, or play in this page)

    Please submit possible lyrics that may work with it. They can be submitted as text and/or as a recording. Please make it clear which lyrics align with which section.

    Sections can (and should) be repeated or modified as necessary. This is a collaboration and is merely meant to be a starting point.

     

     

    Submissions

    Send your submission via email to collaboration@songwritersinseattle.com

     

     

  • “Mooncakes” on NPR’s Marketplace

    Songwriters in Seattle had a really cool and unexpected bit of national media attention Monday with our song, “A Black Market For Mooncakes” being part of a segment on NPR’s Marketplace. I’ve been asked a lot about how it happened, all the way back to the origin story of the song, so I thought I’d give you the lowdown on how it went down. First, here are the links to the NPR piece itself, as they have the text of what was read on air along with the whole song posted here:

    NPR Marketplace segment on Mooncakes song

    You can hear the entire audio of the Marketplace segment on their posted podcast here (our “Final Word” bit starts around 25:15):

    9/12/11 Marketplace segment audio

    So what’s the connection to Marketplace in the first place? Back in Sept. of 2010 my friend Skye Hansen posted a link to a Marketplace article by NPR Marketplace China correspondent Rob Schmitz called “A Black Market For Mooncakes” on her Facebook wall. I had only seen the headline come across my screen and it struck me as unique and poetic – so off the cuff I immediately commented on the post, “Sounds like a song title…” (completely in jest, of course). What Skye commented back was magical:

    “There’s a black market for mooncakes
    That appears in the dead of night
    It’s right next to that store with the fallingstar jam
    And other unearthly delights!”

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    As I was at once surprised and blown away, I definitely wanted to make this into a real song. So I did try in vain for a few weeks to see if I could do anything with it, to no avail. Thus the Songwriters in Seattle “mashup” event where I brought what I thought could be a decent seed for a group collaboration. After some discussion about Rob’s article and the potential themes of China’s repression, underground rebellion, people coming together despite restriction to celebrate their passions, and the poetic symbol of the cosmic eatery, it was agreed that we’d give it a shot. (Note: Rob’s article wasn’t really about any of those things – it was more what we were inspired to think about based on the seed idea). With the throwing out of my portion of the attempted lyrics and some tweeking of Skye’s original chorus, we went to work.

    As you can imagine, 10 songwriters in a room trying to write the same song was…challenging. Lyrics and associated chords were written (and crossed out) with big black markers on large sheets of paper and stuck to the walls. There was much chaotic guitar playing and random singing. Some were frustrated, some thought it was going nowhere – or at least nowhere worthwhile. But after 3 hours or so, we had something – it wasn’t much, but we had something and it was actually pretty good. With me standing up at the sheets on the wall and trying to direct everyone to verses and choruses that would make a reasonable finished structure with what we had (only one verse of lyrics in addition to what we started with plus the chords to the two sections), we hit record on Jessica Lynne’s iPhone and ran through it best we could:

    (Warning – this is super rough, with beer bottles clanking as they fall over, yelling directions, and other such fumbling to get through)
    [audio:https://songwritersinseattle.com/audio/BlackMarket_SiSmash.mp3]

    Now fast forward a few months…based on that recording I obviously had some work to do to make the song into a listenable finished piece, but it finally came together. Recording was fun as this is not anywhere near a typical style for me. Breaking out the nylon string guitar for a flamenco solo and faking castanets with spoons from the kid’s toy percussion set were especially unusual. And then singing along with Jessica Lynne and David Rix to make us sound like a much larger group was a real kick. Overall, I am very happy with how the song and recording turned out. I feel it represents the collaborative talents and aspirations of Songwriters in Seattle very well.

    Many thanks again to David whose great idea and, more importantly, his action it was to send the recording to the original author of the Marketplace article which inspired the song, Rob Schmitz, and got the next part of the story started. Rob’s response:

    “All I can say is: Wow. I knew I had hit upon something when I reported the
    mooncakes story, but I never in my wildest dreams thought it was worthy of
    moving a group of musicians to song. Well done. I¹m honored my bizarre
    little story inspired your group to write and perform this piece.”

    Rob forwarded it to his producers in LA and next thing you know, David and I are working out the details with Marketplace Producer Fiona Ng to get the song on the air and linked on their website. Some vague details about what we should expect and when…then a few days later…boom! “I thought it was kinda catchy…” – Marketplace host, Kai Ryssdal. How cool is that? Thanks to Rob and Fiona for making it all happen.

    There you have it! This is yet another great example of the amazing things that can happen when we work together!

  • Release of “A Black Market For Mooncakes”

    Songwriters in Seattle is proud to present the new song “A Black Market For Mooncakes” – In Nov. 2010, 10 songwriters got together for an SiS songwriting collaboration event and wrote it based on just a short but inspiring few lyric lines! Those lyrics were inspired by a Sept. 2010 news article about a Chinese festival. So we have a little underground rebellion and celebration theme wrapped up in a Santana-ish Latino Rock sound. No, it’s not at all like the styles of any of the songwriters involved. That’s part of the beauty of collaboration – you can end up with something entirely different than you would create on your own.

    All credited participants include:

    Skye Hansen
    Julie Gwinn
    David Rix
    Todd Christoffel
    Jessica Lynne
    Chris Klimecky
    Jeff Hatch
    Kelly Smith
    Bill Derry
    Charlie Cabrera
    Derek Medina

    SiS Organizer Chris Klimecky arranged and produced the song with Jessica Lynne and David Rix contributing to the group vocals. This recording has now been made available for your listening and downloading enjoyment. If you download, please consider a small donation to SiS. Thank you!