Through years of participation in music scenes of the Pacific Northwest I’ve seen shared spaces emerge, change, and sometimes disappear. But wherever our local songwriters find opportunity they do amazing work, gathering community around expressive energy and poetic beauty. Northwest Songcraft is an idea (and an organization) intent on supporting regional songwriters and the spaces where their magic is shared.
When I notice how much of our arts-language is borrowed from consumerism and celebrity spheres, I’m prompted to clarify something: we are not here in service of the entertainment industry and its commodification of art. Most creative souls do not thrive in the eternal limbo of a global, virtual on-ramp to monetized fame where traffic has ceased to move. Mass markets – both ‘traditional’ product sales and broadcast media, and newer online streaming and influencing spheres – rely on cultural extraction for profit, on mining what we create and what we pay attention to, in order to depersonalize and transactionalize it.
But this doesn’t make me lean into academic ideas of songwriting or culture. What you build in your region is not theory; it’s life. While I admire the culture of the university, too often I’ve seen a similar kind of novelty addiction and personal (intellectual) celebrity focus prevail there as well. Relevance for artistic creation and sharing is not a matter of theory, historical one-upmanship or experimental combinatorics; it’s a matter of love, of community, of shared energy and experience and meaning in a place and time.
I’m deeply fascinated by, and devoted to, what happens when cultural treasures are not stripped from their region, re-engineered for novelty and stretched as far as they can go as consumer products, or condescendingly placed in an academic encyclopedist’s framework. Like the ecosystem of an old-growth forest, I believe that the deepest, richest, most meaningful and most sustainable culture comes about when a people in a region invent it for themselves, attending to creativity where they live and engage. Much like farm-to-table and regional craft beverages improve our local food culture, Northwest Songcraft is about recognizing and developing deeply original music culture directly and locally.
I am excited for the work and shared experiences to come, and hope to connect with you.
— C. A. Corbell, co-founder and President, Northwest Songcraft