Marcus Bonfanti

This week I have written with a 75 year old, a 7 year old and 15 prison inmates…
I have been songwriting since I first picked up the guitar aged fifteen. It started as something I loved doing with my oldest school friend after we had decided to form a band while not paying attention in Chemistry Class. We had sorted the logo, track names and album running-order of these unwritten songs by the end of the class, we practiced the next day and played our first gig later that month.

I then went on to study songwriting at University which sadly took away a lot of my confidence in my ability to write due to the way that particular course was taught and graded. It destroyed any joy I got from songwriting in about three semesters and convinced me I was not a good writer. It took me a while to be able to write again, I surrounded myself with musicians I trusted and after slowly bringing songs into a supportive atmosphere my confidence came back to the point where i felt i could release a solo album.

Since then the journey has been varied. I’ve written with people one-on-one, in larger groups, for very strict briefs, for ever-changing briefs, with young artists who had just signed their first major deal, with musicians in their seventies who have seen it all, for money, for free but all of it had the same goal. Creating a song that would sell. It needed to fill criteria to get on the radio or be a ‘single’. The end goal was always to showcase this song in some way that made financial sense.

I’ve always struggled with the thinking behind songwriting, some of the best things i’ve written have taken almost as long to write as it does to perform them but then others have been worked on and revisited for years, there’s no real winning formula and that’s the beauty.

Working with The Spitz has allowed me to go back to the real heart of songwriting and experience that freedom I did when I started out.

Over the past few months I have been working with a few residents that I have built connections with over the repeat visits I have made to Bridgeside Lodge Care Home over the years. Rather than collecting stories and creating songs based around them, which we have done in the past. I wanted to see if I could get them to write as much of the song as possible by presenting them musical options and allowing them to be in charge of the lyrical content. This has taken a lot of time and after four sessions with one particular resident we almost have a completed song that I feel is entirely their choices and creativity.
This particular song was created through singing together at the end of playing songs I knew they liked and then seeing where the flow of our two voices would take us and settling on a melody and then pointing to words that they had written in books to find lyrical ideas which then led to the resident presenting lyrical ideas verbally. It has been a beautiful experience and the song is very much their work.

This same week I visited Great Ormond Street with The Spitz. It is still early in our relationship with them but we have settled into a great rhythm there already. We had spoken about the idea of trying some form of songwriting with the children in the future and how that might work. On the second ward we visited, the play coordinator told us one of the children had been writing their own short stories and that maybe we could try and put some of them to music.

What happened instead was, they wanted to write an original song with us and so it started. Their creativity and imagination started flowing. I asked them questions about ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ chords, fast and slow rhythms and got them to choose a guitar part they liked and then the lyrics started flowing. It was an incredible experience and after about 15minutes we had written a song together about a magic apple that turned into a Rainbow when it rained. All this came from the child and all I did was try and put it into a song format with a melody. Given more time and if this had been planned I would have tried to get more melodic ideas from the child but this was impromptu and I enjoyed it more for that.

Outside of my work with The Spitz, I also work with The Prison Choir Project. I started out running choirs in various prisons across the country and now we also do songwriting workshops.

This week was our penultimate session of our course which entailed trying to tie a lot of individual ideas together into a cohesive piece of music. Between the three of us that run the workshop we managed to incorporate a gentleman who loved songs from musicals with some rappers and singers. What happened in that two hour session was truly inspirational and we created a song that incorporated all the creativity in the room. One of the men proclaimed that he didn’t want the session to end which meant so much to us.

These three different experiences heavily influenced the album I have been making with two of my favourite musicians and closest friends over this week. The creative freedom The Spitz and Prison Choir Project gives me is such a positive influence on all other writing I do.