Charlie’s Community SongFactory- Supported by The Alfie Carpenter Charity For Creative Arts

A play on Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, Charlie’s Community SongFactory harks back the beginning of the 20th century to the days of Tin Pan Alley, when writers were given a brief and had to churn out a song in a day. Not so intense as that, the Community SongFactory is a workshop with a professional singer-songwriter (in this case, me) and a community group. The song can be written in a day or spread out over regular sessions over several weeks. The end product is an mp3 recording of the song, which everybody in the group has contributed to, unveiled at a final listening party. The by-product is getting together and having a held conversation, evoking joy, smiles, laughter and new friends.

What sessions did I undertake with the grant money from The Alfie Carpenter Charity For Creative Arts?

I wrote four songs with four care homes. In each home, I held three weekly songwriting sessions. Once we’d written the song together, I took it into a music studio to record it. Then we had a listening party, and listened back to all the songs from the project. The listening parties were a lovely party featuring tea, coffee and scones or cake.

Reflections On Each Group – How did we write the songs?

Oakwood House

Oakwood House offers complex care specialising in mental health. We had a range of needs in the room such as dementia, Huntingdon’s disease and schizophrenia. They loved reggae music so I performed a lot of Bob Marley throughout the project.
One participant said that in his lifetime as a farmer he was the ‘jack of all trades, master of none’. This got a round of laughter in the room, and many of the participants could relate to this. We made it our chorus. We talked about the jobs people had done in their lives whilst one of the residents scribed what people were saying. We had one participant who was a firefighter, one who was in the navy and cooked a cake for the Queen, and a wide array of jobs and views on life. It sparked a really great conversation between the residents.

All these different stories, I thought they sounded like a Bob Dylan song, with lots of jumbled ideas which evoke strong imagery packed into a song. Taking influence from Dylan’s track Subterranean Homesick Blues, we fitted the participants stories into the verses of the song. With each line I would ask the group if they were happy with what we’d done. Sometimes they would say ‘no’ and it was back to the drawing board thinking of a new line. All the participants were together and invested in make the best song we could.   

One of the care staff said she had worked it out that so far working in care she had made 50,000 cups of tea, and she had 50,000 more to go before she retired. All the residents loved that line, and we shouted it all together three times. I added it into the final recording.
At the listening party they were thrilled with how our song sounded, and they loved listening to the songs written by the other care homes. To the song written by Highlands Care Home ‘Big Waves’, one lady was dancing in her chair with her eyes shut peacefully and her hands moving gracefully like ocean waves. It was a moment of joy inspired by one of the other homes songs.

Often songs I’ve written with the community are positive, lighthearted songs but this one had a bluesy bite. It was a first for me and I learnt a lot creating it.

Oakwood House are learning the song weekly to sing it themselves at their Christmas party, with the lyrics on a projector. They have begun attending a local music project once a month called Participate which is run by Britten Pears Arts.

Highlands Care Homes

In Highlands care home in Woodbridge I was met with a lack of enthusiasm for the project, with participants saying that they don’t do music or songwriting, but thought they would come along to find out what it was and say ‘hi’. The first session mostly comprised of a chat, and although I wrote a few things down on a flipchart, which would later become inspiration for lyrics, we didn’t do a lot of music. We decided that the song was going to be about sailing and boats.

In the second session, I took off a painting on the wall of a ship sailing on the river Deben, which really helped us to get in the mood. Although some of the participants had quite advanced dementia, they were able to recall stories from their past about sailing. The daughter of one lady attended a session and said that she had never heard that story from her Mother before. I think sometimes with  conversation with adults in later life, especially those with dementia it can be very effective to have a theme of conversation and really take your time to leave the silences while people think. Songwriting with groups can teach a new way of listening and having a conversation with people with dementia.

We ended up writing a beautiful song about sailing, watching big waves come up to you, waiting and waiting before coming down the other side. The chorus lyrics were taken from things Barbara was saying ‘you almost hold your breath from waiting’ was a line taken directly from her which I thought was very poetic and sweet.

Another participant Katie had this amazing story about how when she lived in the isle of dogs in the second world war, to get to her school in Greenwich she had to take a rowing boat over the Thames for a while. This was because the Greenwich tunnel was bombed. It cost a tuppence a ride, and sometimes when she was halfway across, the bomb sirens would sound, and they would have to row back to shore as fast as they could!

Seckford Almhouses

This group had a real mix of abilities. Some with dementia needed the session to run quite slowly but some participants who were mentally sharp were enthused to write a good song. The question I asked them as the basis to write a song was ‘what makes you happy’?

After an in depth brain storm on the first week, four of the participants went away and wrote long poems using the material we had generated. This is where the hook for the chorus ‘Look for the things that make you smile’ comes from. Many of the lyrics in the song came from these poems too.

We were often talking about rainbows and how we could make them fit into the song.

I was suggesting that we should talk about it raining and some sad times before making it happy again. Some of the participants were very passionate that there should be nothing sad in the song at all. It reflected their life outlook of always looking on the positive side. To reflect this, rather than keeping the mood of the music lighthearted and happy, I tried to make it like a passionate force of nature, driving the music along. This created a different kind of happy song which I’ve never written before, and which I really love.

It’s quite an inspiring song, and I recently played it in a hospital setting at the Gardens & Jacobs Neurological Centres in Sawbridgeworth. The participants really loved it and so did the staff.

This was the most challenging group to work with. This was because there were some really strong opinions in the room, pulling the song in different directions. It was difficult to keep everybody happy, and in the end, I had to take control of the room and stand my ground on some aspects of the song in order for it to work. For example, one lady didn’t like that I was using a repetitive melody and similar chords throughout the song. She wanted it to change keys throughout the verse. I got through this by telling her that in order for me to sing this song, it needs to be in my style. We are not writing a song for a 50s jazz singer to sing. We are writing it for folk singer Charlie Law to sing. This helped us navigate through stylistic differences in music and focus back on the lyrics. I also felt like it gave the song more authenticity. In the end, the group respected me standing my ground and we all moved forwards united. This was a situation I had not really encountered before in my practice, and now that I have found this solution and a way forwards with it, I’ll be able to arrive at it more quickly to unite a group in future sessions. Writing for the artist leading the session puts limitations and boundaries on how the song will come out, and it simulates the song factories of old when songwriters would write with a specific artist in mind.

Shaftesbury House 

At Shaftesbury house, I was working with more advanced dementia than in the other homes. It meant that I could get a quick win though, as one lady would often ask me ‘are you coming back to see us again? ‘ throughout the session. I would say ‘yes, I’m coming back next week!’. She would say ‘oh, wonderful!’, and everyone would laugh.

I gave this group a similar task to Seckford Almhouses- ‘what makes you happy?’. They all agreed that what makes them happiest of all is having someone to talk to. One lady even said that she used to go down to Ipswich town centre and just talk to strangers, just to have someone to talk to. Once we came up with the chorus, I asked them ‘who do you like to talk to?’. We thought of all the many people that they like to talk to, and we used this to come up with ideas for the verses.

The song came out really well, and they all had a great time. It surprised me that although some of them couldn’t remember many things that had happened 30 seconds ago, they could remember the song from last week and recognised who I was. It’s well known that music can have a magic effect on people with dementia, but it’s most often associated with music from their youth. They could really remember the song that they were writing and creatively engaged with it each week and felt a real ownership over the song in the final session. They all understood that it was their song and that they had been helping write for the last four weeks.

Final Thoughts

For one lady at Shaftesbury House, it brought back memories of when she played in a rock ‘n’ roll band when she was in her 20s. She said to me that it felt like she’d connected with her old life again. I think the fact that she had been part of the writing process, part of the band, impacted her so much more than somebody coming in just to perform to her.

What a different experience, a different feeling, to be part of the band, than simply watching the band.

Activating creativity engages different parts of the brain. When working with dementia (which effects different parts of the brain), how can we find the strongest pathways? Can we change the way we communicate to meet a participant where they are at? Is language always useful? Do we only communicate with words and their meanings, or can we communicate joy, laughter and smiles without talking? Is the ultimate goal of these sessions to create a great song, or create feelings of togetherness and love?

I performed the songs as part of a fundraising concert for the charity at the UPC in Debenham and we raised £1200. This article in The East Anglian Daily Times was sent to me by a friend and was published by Sanctuary Care.