Considerations for Collaborations
The making of full-length album "Play Beautifully" with Leah Shaw
“The collaborators you need come to you once you've got your own vision defined.” —Leah Shaw
Preview: Episode 58 with singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Leah Shaw
In order to bring her full-length album Play Beautifully to life, Leah Shaw needed lots of collaborators. She not only ended up with a stunning sonic exploration of loss, healing and self-transformation, she learned a lot about the challenges and benefits of collaboration. How to find collaborators? How to work best with friends? How to get the technical skills you need so you can achieve the effects you want? And perhaps most importantly, how to trust the process. Leah is not only a fabulous singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and film composer whose music blends intimate vocals with folk, orchestral and ambient electronic elements, she is also our new audio producer and we’re delighted to introduce her to you in this episode!
From an early age, Shaw studied classical and church music, and then obtained a bachelor’s in orchestral music in college at James Madison University, where she began to explore her own musical voice. After several years as an independent musician in New York City, she returned to graduate school for music and received her MFA from Brooklyn College and has worked as a full-time audio professional ever since. The music video for the dreamy and cinematic single “You Knew Me” drops this year. Leah previously released several recordings and short film scores. For more information about Play Beautifully, read this review or visit this video about creating the vinyl.
What We’re Reading and Listening to:
Rosemerry:
When it comes to prompt books for poets, I so highly recommend Exploring Poetry of Presence: A companion guide for readers, writers and workshop facilitators by Gloria Heffernan. Based on the popular mindfulness poetry anthology, this book of prompts is creative, provocative and fun. So much inspiration in these pages!
A friend gave me Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief by Joanne Cacciatore, PhD. I am only three chapters in, and already I have found some measure of peace and useful tools in these pages.
Christie:
I just read Bewilderment, by Richard Powers, and I loved it so much it inspired me to go back and start over on his gorgeous Pulitzer Prize-winner novel, The Overstory. I had started that novel a few times, but it’s one that has so many interconnected threads that if you momentarily put it down (as I mistakenly did) you really need to start over to keep track of them. I’m now 2/3 of the way through and totally transfixed. What I love about both novels is Powers’s ability to capture the essence of the natural world and our relationship with it. Bewilderment is a thought-provoking exploration of how we meet the world when the world is shit, and how parents talk to their kids about a broken world. I fell in love with the young son who is the novel’s main character.
A Favorite Collaborative Game
I love this simple mad-lib game—fun to play around the table. It’s a variation on a line from Emily Dickinson, and it just so happens to be a great way to make up funny and sometimes evocative metaphors.
We start with a famous line:
Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.
and use it as a madlib to create our own metaphors:
abstract is the animal that verb in the place
For instance:
Fear is the kingfisher that dives in the pond of my thoughts.
Lust is the crawdad who dances in the corner
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Two Questions:
(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)
What do you look for in a creative collaborator?
What do you find most challenging about collaborations?