Songwriting | The Welcome Wagon

Course Description

NEW: Download a single from The Welcome Wagon's upcoming album, Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices, here. The album will drop on June 12--during TWW's time at Glen East.

In this workshop we will talk and think and listen together about making songs. Our intention is that our time together will be imbued with a spirit of levity, generosity and fun. We'll spend some time doing some writing exercises, listening to examples of great songs, talking about how songs "work", and other activities to stir our imaginations. But the majority of our time will be spent in listening to one another's work. Workshop participants will be invited to perform their material at the workshop (a piano and guitar are provided; other instruments are welcome as well) so that the rest of us might provide encouragement, direction, help in taking the songs apart (gently!), and in putting them back together. There is a $20 lab fee for this workshop.

Submissions: If you are interested in performing at the workshop, please submit three original songs along with lyrics, preferably recent works, to glenworkshop@imagejournal.org by May 1, 2012 to help the instructors prepare for class. Please also bring 15 copies of your lyrics to class when you arrive.

About The Welcome Wagon

The Welcome Wagon is a married couple, the Reverend Thomas Vito Aiuto (educated at Princeton Theological Seminary and now senior pastor of Resurrection Presbyterian Church in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY) and his wife Monique (visual artist Cooper Union, BFA, Columbia University, MFA) who execute a genre of gospel music that is refreshingly plain. Their hymns are modest and melodic and take on a vast history of sacred song traditions, Vito on self-taught guitar and Monique accompanying on toy glockenspiel or harmonica; the two amble through old hymnals, psalters, and prayerbooks with the simple desire to know their Maker—and to know each other—more intimately. These living-room arrangements took on new meaning in collaboration with Sufjan Stevens, a friend and neighbor since 2001, who produced their debut album, Welcome to the Welcome Wagon, an album of hymns, pop covers, and folksy originals in which husband and wife wrote and arranged the songs with the simplicity of a country chapel, while Stevens dressed them up in the transcendent musical vestments for which he is now well known. This unlikely partnership produced a sublime addition to that genre called "church music”. Currently, Monique and Vito are finishing up the recording of their second LP, Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices, which will be released on Asthmatic Kitty Records in early 2012.