Workshop with Sasami Ashworth (April '26)

In April 2026, Sasami led a four-week School of Song songwriting workshop built around a promise she makes in the first lecture: to hand over the practice itself rather than a shortcut, or as she puts it, "giving you the cow instead of the milk." A classically trained French horn player who has made an intimate debut, a metal-inspired record, and a pop record, Sasami teaches through live vocal exercises, close listening, and demonstrations of her own songs at every stage from voice memo to album.

Class 1: Starting From Voice makes the case that if you sing, you're a vocalist, and that a song can begin with the voice instead of the chords. Sasami covers the practical foundations: finding your home key, getting to know your range and vocal break, and hearing melody as a shape, with examples ranging from Aretha Franklin's melisma to Snail Mail's falling gestures. Tracing one of her own songs from a melody written on a hike and caught in a voice memo to the finished album version, she shows how exploratory vocalizing becomes the seed of a song.

Class 2: Observations in Pop is a close study of what makes pop music work and what any songwriter can borrow from it. Through close studies of a handful of familiar pop songs, Sasami shows how songs built on a single repeating chord progression create their sections through rhythm, vocal range, and narrative instead, and she uses one of her own songs to teach counter melody. Underneath the analysis is an argument about pleasure: letting go of the guilt around catchy music and studying it as seriously as anything else.

Class 3: Dreams, Demos, DAWs, Oh My! moves from dreaming a song to building its demo. Sasami argues that you have to be the first person to take your art seriously, introducing fedora mode: approaching your art with the gravity of a middle school theater kid in their first role. A from-scratch GarageBand recreation of Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams," made on the same refurbished iPad she has used to demo all three of her albums, shows how frictionless capturing an idea can be, and how demos become the blueprints that collaborators work from.

Class 4: The Album as Dissertation reframes the album as a bounded research project: pick something to study, do the actual work, and present your findings in your own voice. Sasami walks through her three records as case studies, from the ear training and gear-forum archaeology behind her self-titled debut, to method-acting her way into metal for Squeeze, to building the cinematic character world of Blood on the Silver Screen. The class examines how to commit fully to an era's obsession and move on when the research is done.

Here are a few words from Sasami about the course:

"People like to refer to music or song as nouns, but I prefer them in the verb form. I grew up playing french horn and singing church music, so before I even knew what a composition was, it was just something we did. For some, songwriting is mathematical, methodical and achieves a level of human accomplishment that is breathtaking. For others it is more spiritual and although technically instruments are held, it's an act that transcends the physical world. For a lot of us it's literally an impulse that we can't help like burping. Any of the ways- it's all made up!

There is no right or wrong way to sing or make music, there are only those who follow their curiosity and those who don't. Even the concept of a “song”… sure it feels good to put a name to a bundle of energy and call it universal, but I don't even know how I feel about objectifying something as unbounded as music making!

I've studied classical music, improvisation, rock-folk-pop songwriting, and all I know is that I love the feeling of visiting a musical realm, searching for the message and doing my best to wrangle it- maybe a song is more like a beast or spirit that we cajole into our arms? Songwriting is a practice, it's worship, it's study, it's exploration. In my course I am going to guide us through a few of the infinite ways to approach it and find stories in our work."

Testimonials from April 2026 Students:

Dear Sasami, thank you for such a great learning experience. I'm feeling very confident and inspired to continue songwriting in a more focused, structured, and fun way now thanks to you. You gave so many practical, actionable gems to us - there really is something powerful and magical to motivating so many people in such a short time to create so many songs. It seems like you managed to inspire and connect people from all levels of experience to their muse. F#%king amazing!

Thank you so much for the thoughtfulness in all of the lectures. You had obviously put a lot of effort into crafting a clear narrative of the lectures that oftentimes I would have a question and then it would get answered in the next sentence. The vocal warmup exercise specifically was one that I'm so glad you helped normalize by doing it with us, and now I'm doing it regularly and really have noticed the difference in my singing quality. I feel super inspired and empowered. Can't thank you enough!

Thank you for your generosity, insight, and encouragement. I loved your lectures and especially loved peeking behind the curtain of your creative practice. It made making music, the idea of making a full album, feel accessible and that I have the power to make all of my weird musical fantasies come true.