The songwriting competitions hosted by the Play It Strange Trust have been prevalent and well-attended ever since the first one - that was in early 2004. There was a sense of curiosity in the first instance when it was launched. The older generation here and across New Zealand hadn’t emerged from their younger years with an understanding of the creative detail riding along with the song smithing. Let’s stand back and look at this.
My bearing witness to songwriting and its power came from the enormous presence and penetration of the original songs written and recorded by the Beatles. They seemed to have - they DID HAVE - a simple knowing of what makes lines of melody and emphatic rhythms have a truly appealing power. The stories and tuneful hooks of their songs embedded themselves into an exciting permanence from which they never strayed. And they are still there.
In the early years of popular song there was an ‘education’ gleaned through to the public songs being on the soundtracks of movies. An example? If you went, say, to the hit film Breakfast At Tiffanys you would have fallen for the song from it - “Moon River”; and it would have stayed with you. However, that fixation would actually lead to not much emerging in your life. But around ten years later if you went to the movie Ferry Across The Mersey that song of the same title would mirror the era you were living in and it would engage and stay with you for many many years, as happened. Especially with the Beatles leading to A Hard Days Night and Help with their accompanying hit singles. There was a wide sweep of popular hit songs pouring out from Liverpool, and It became and was branded as the Magic Land. It sealed the popular culture of songs across and through the lives of global youth. It was a unique vibrant world for us all to embrace. Singular and unforgettable. And here we can stand back and bring this pattern to a proof.
We can say that songs are special constructions – firstly there are the words that we foster and then music that we hear in its weaving formats and then - the two merge together.
Songs are what they are. Those golden words from afar.
Some of them stay with us forever.
They come to us as luminous trails from the breath of space.
Yes – if the rights of man are to pervade all the nations of the earth - then a songwriter may set their foot anywhere on its surface and say: This is my world! This is my audience!
And time passes and songs fill our planet. They are the literature of every nation. And they generate a set of resonances. They live within us. And with this spirit, we hold onto them.