Songwriting Workshop with Angel Olsen (October 2026)

I want to explore songwriting as a practice of listening, collecting, experimenting, and exposing the truth.

I think of songwriting as a process of gathering. When I worked at a café, I would write on the backs of receipts during slow periods or on a fifteen-minute break. Now I’m constantly recording voice memos or making little phone demos. I don’t necessarily believe that a song has to reveal itself immediately, or even that you have to know what you’re writing about while you’re writing it. Sometimes you make something and wait for your life to catch up with it.

Lately I’ve been exploring/allowing myself to be less clever in my lyrical writing. I want more space. I want to trust melody, repetition, feeling, and simplicity without immediately looking for the sharpest line or the most interesting way to say something. I’ve been inspired by a lot of rhythmic and choral music that can be expansive or repetitive and still contain an enormous amount of feeling.

I’m interested in the idea that limitations can actually create freedom. In the workshop, we’ll look at different ways of entering a song with a strict structure, like borrowing the syllable count or cadence of an existing song and filling that structure with an entirely different life. Sometimes we’ll begin with an image, a film, a handful of random words, a chord progression, or a song in a language we don’t understand.

A formula doesn’t make something less original. The structure can be the house; what you put inside it is yours.

We’ll also spend time separating feeling from explanation. Through journaling, visual exercises, melody, mistranslation, and writing from perspectives outside of our own, we’ll look for ways to get closer to the instinct underneath an idea before deciding what it means.

I want us to explore worlds that aren’t ours, but also to become more aware of the ways we hide when we try to describe our own.

My goal isn’t to teach one correct way to write a song. It’s to develop more ways of finding songs and to become better at recognizing when something real has appeared.