Songwriting Workshop with Michael Hadreas [Perfume Genius] (June '26)

In June 2026, Michael Hadreas (Perfume Genius) led a four-week School of Song songwriting workshop tracing his process from first spark to finished record. The thread running through all four lectures is tension, the friction he listens for in music and builds into his own songs. Throughout the workshop, Michael teaches from his own sessions, demos, and notes, letting the class see where the songs actually come from.

Class 1: Tension starts with the concept at the center of his writing: the friction he looks for in music and tries to capture in his own. Michael explains his practice of always recording: long exploratory sessions, sung mostly in gibberish, where he wades into what he calls the swamp and goes over the top on purpose to get past ambient, surface-level thoughts. Drawing on the raw exploration recordings behind one of his own songs, the class follows an idea all the way from gibberish to finished demo.

Class 2: Creating a Sonic World picks up once a song's spark has been found and turns to building the sonic world around it. Michael lays out his mind, body, spirit framework for a song's elements and argues that the goal is not to harmonize the three but to let them coexist, since the tension between them is what resonates. Through his own sessions, reaching back to the first song he ever wrote, the class examines how those worlds get built piece by piece, then turns to the scene change: the sudden pivot in sound or perspective, heard in Fiona Apple and in his own writing, that shows a song's world from a new angle.

Class 3: Two Worlds turns to lyrics. Michael describes his words as coming from two places: plain language and the spirit world. The plainspoken side holds the full true story behind one of his songs and what it means to write about a memory with grace; the spirit side is about letting the gibberish of a demo grow into finished lyrics without losing the feeling that sparked it. Running under both is his word soup method, the giant notes file where everything goes in and nothing gets edited out, and one rule for keeping a lyric honest: every ingredient should move you.

Class 4: The Finish Line follows his songs into the studio, where demos become records. Tracing what changed between his demos and their finished versions, the class looks at how another musician's idea can redirect a song entirely and pull a new kind of performance out of him, and why he chooses collaborators who confront him and fill in his gaps. It then widens beyond the songs themselves, to the videos and album covers that finish building each record's world.

Testimonials from June 2026 Students:

Thank you so much Michael. The time and energy you devoted to this class was a gift. You were incredibly thoughtful and generous in your lectures, in your answers to questions, and with sharing all the elements of your process. I truly felt like you loved teaching us, that you cared about all of us and really wanted to help us learn and grow. Even though the class was online, it felt intimate, as if you were in a small seminar room with all of us that allowed you to connect with each of us individually and as a group. I think that is one of your superpowers, because you have an amazing ability to connect with your audience when you are performing as well. I've loved your music for a long time, and taking this class felt like a privilege and like I was in on a very special secret.

Although I'm a beginner, I feel a stronger, more urgent belief in my potential, coupled with a level of confidence in my ability to make something that I find genuinely thrilling, and have a good time doing so. I don't know how much teaching this class has done for you, but it's done a lot for me. This was the most worthwhile thing I've chosen this year, thank you for this and everything.

You have an incredible way of distilling this weird thing that you do to something tangible, digestible, and implementable and I found a completely new way of writing, singing and performing through this class. I was so moved by how much space you had for so many different (and occasionally, simultaneous) emotions, and how you've emboldened us to seek out creations that do the same thing. Thank you for your honesty, openness, warmth, humor, wildness, and of course, grace. You've changed my life again!