I had the wonderful pleasure of participating on a live call with Brian Doerksen about songwriting from the team at www.worshiptraining.com today and I even got to ask a question sitting right in my kitchen with my family all around!  What a crazy world we live in.

Brian had a ton of great things to say about the craft of songwriting.  He talked about the dance between having words with true meaning, and artistic truth and beauty as well. You want the words to be true and you want them to be creative, to fit well in the mouth, to be interesting and inspiring and captivating.  In worship songs for the church, the “truth” has to lead, but both partners have to be strong in order for the song to endure. “Musical style ebbs and flows and constantly changes, but the truth never goes out of style!”

He also talked about 3 mistakes that songwriters often have:

1) trying to do to much with 1 song, list songs where there isn’t enough focus

2) truth without beauty.  worship song must be true but also inspiring and fresh. They need to capture the imagination and roll well off the tongue.

3) beauty with fuzzy truth/questionable theology. In the quest to be creative, they lose sight of the fact that clear truth has to lead the way.

He also talked about his songwriting teaching DVDs, his book “Make Love, Make War” and his stage play “the Prodigal Father” I believe, which they are trying to come out with soon.  He and his wife Joyce have a ton of kids including multiple special needs kids, which I can identify with.  He also serves quite deeply in his local church and has times when he is so busy pastoring that he won’t write anything for even 6 months at a time.  His church is involved in reaching out to the poor and he talks about the battle and the incredible sense of the presence of God in prison ministry.  Amazing that he has time for  all that.

And at the end, I got to ask my question: “When you look over history, many if not most of the older songs had different writers for the music and lyrics, and they were often separated by decades and the writers often never met.  Today we expect both these things to come from the same person.  What are your thoughts?”

He responded that it was a good observation and that he highly encourages co-writing and maybe God is planting a seed in me to do just that.

I am still wondering if it might be a reality of the modern world we live in.  We have more free time.  It’s a smaller world.  I know a couple famous songwriters who just did a cowriting session over skype, and others have been doing cowriting over the phone for years….

Anyhow, it was a great call that gave me a lot to chew on.

Hope y’all enjoyed reading about it.  If you want to hear the recording of the call, you should be able to if you join www.worshiptraining.com.  Not sure what the cost is.  I took the online “worship essentials courses” and they were awesome and they threw in a free 1 year membership.

Thanks all!