Mentor Song

[Niobe Hennigan]

Sincethe beginning of SongTown, Clay Mills & I have made it our mission to ONLY offer real-world training from real-world pros. We believe you will learn best from those who are walking the walk. All of our ST mentors who work with our members are not only full-time pros, but they also have the hearts of teachers. They have been where you are and know what it takes to get to where they are.

We listen to a song, then I ask the writer what they think I will say about their song. After they respond, I give them my feedback. My goal as a songwriting mentor is always to work my way out of a job by teaching the writer how to critique their own songs. When they start telling me exactly what I was going to say, I know they are getting it.

Sometimes, writers throw out ideas and I help them figure out which ideas are worth pursuing. Or, they may have me help them determine which songs they should demo and which ones are not worth demoing. (that plan can be a HUGE money saver)

We access where they are. Then we look at where they are wanting to be eventually, and we make a plan that will help them get there. Our business plans always include measurable goals that let the writer gauge how they are doing and makes sure they are moving in the right direction.

Both approaches are valuable and can help you get closer to your songwriting goals. Whether you find your mentor through SongTown or somewhere else, I encourage each of you to find a mentor that can help you get to the next level with your writing. It will be the best investment you ever make.

At my first hackathon, I had no idea how backend services really worked and how I could get the code running on my machine to communicate with code running on other machines. Having mentors at Hack Western helped. I learned about how web services communicate between each other and the applications that run on devices. I also learned how to stand up and configure cloud instances and deploy my web services to them. Mentors are usually welcome to sign up at hackathons to help out, but they mostly come as company representatives because hackathons are a great place to recruit new talent. In fact, I landed a co-op experience through Hack Western and Hack The North, and it ended up being my favourite co-op.

But best of all I got to help eager students, some of them in high school, learn about web and mobile development, machine learning, and image prediction and offer the same sort of helpful insight I benefited from during my hackathons.

I have always felt that even though most hackathons advertise themselves as beginner friendly by offering mentorship, StarterHacks truly takes it to the next level with their workshops and high mentorship to attendee ratio. I still believe that hackathons are one of the best ways students can easily get a taste of having real world development experience. And if you have more experience, volunteering as a mentor at a hackathon is a great way to give back to the community, while broadening your horizons.

More than anything, Frank Ocean has been a role model to me: an unofficial mentor whose lyrics were like religious texts to a teenage boy struggling to navigate the complex world of love and heartbreak, sexuality and fluidity, self-love and self-understanding.

Beyond his poetic, open lyrics, he represents how race and sexuality can often work against each other. As a young, Latinx boy raised by the teachings of a conservative religion, understanding my sexuality was a complicated and intimidating process.

For LGBTQ people of color, there are very few celebrities in the world right now that adequately represent the complex intersection of their identities, let alone someone as musically and poetically innovative as Frank Ocean.

And being able to listen to one of his songs and find intimate parts of my own story in his lyrics is a beautiful feeling. Whenever Frank Ocean releases his next album, whether that is in two days or 20 years, I am confident that it will be another reflection of not only his personal story, but of my own.

But spending so much time running through old songs over the last few months has put me in a reflective mood. So go through an exercise with me for a moment, and allow me to ask you a few introspective, perhaps intrusive questions:

So I did. And I played every single one of them, over and over and over again. I stared at their bizarre album covers and studied their liner notes. I wondered why Frank Zappa was so weird and why there was a donkey on the cover of a rock album. I played Innervisions on headphones and nearly lost my mind.

And, in the end, my horizons expanded. I started to LOVE rock and pop and R&B music, and knew that I had only begun to scratch the surface. That felt good to me, even at such a young age, like opening a never-ending can of musical Yoo-Hoo. And man did I love Yoo-Hoo.

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My 10-year old daughter absolutely loved this "Happy" song when she first heard it while watching Despicable Me 2. Ask my family and they will tell you that music is in my blood, a part of my DNA and I cannot get through a day without some kind of music. Over the years I've encountered a song or two that comes along every once in a while where you say, "Wow, this is just incredible - I need to make sure as many other people hear this song as possible." Well, that was the case with Happy and my family, well, we instantly took it to the streets. How did this happen though? I find it fascinating to hear the story behind the story, especially when it comes to music - what is the force behind the creativity? In this case, it turns out to be an awesome mentor.

I recently heard a radio interview with Pharrell Williams (who wrote the song Happy as well as the entire soundtrack for both of the Despicable Me movies) and he was asked about Happy. During the interview Pharrell gives all of the credit to his mentor. In fact, he said, that if it wasn't for his mentor, he would've thought the song, "good enough" on the fifth try. But no, because of his mentor, who told him with the 6th, 7th 8th & 9th version, "...it's not quite there, it's not quite good enough, it's not quite what you are fully capable of," and so he continued pushing on. It was not until the 10th version of the song that his mentor agreed and said - this is it - this is what you are fully capable of. Thus, a hit is born and we've danced to this special song at a wedding or two so far.

The point is, as mentors and coaches, it can be easy to feel just as worn out as who you are supporting. But you have to be even bigger, you have to be even better, you have to be even stronger for them, because they need you to continue to push them.

Can you imagine if we all let our people feel "good enough" about their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd efforts when we know that they are capable of much more? I used to coach my restaurant leaders that they never knew what they were fully capable of until they actually did it. As it turns out, they didn't until they did and it continues to this day.

Good luck to all of you mentors and coaches out there and remember, our challenges are just that - challenges - and are not easy. As the old saying goes, "If it were easy everyone would be doing it." The Happy link is below - enjoy!

In amongst the suite of opportunities to help better our performance are the services of a mentor and coach. People who are wise in process more so than in content, and who help guide, reflect and share lessons to focus and accelerate our learning.

There was a time when such people were like the reclusive oracle whose advice you sought but whose visit remained secret. But today conversations with mentors and coaches abound as evidenced by headlines such as the following noted in Marketplace "In the last ten years the coaching industry has exploded".

Or from the previously mentioned Marketplace and the perspectives of Noel Theodosiou "I would attribute a lot of my success to the way coaching has changed my perspective, and made some things easier and made me prioritize my emotional energy and my time."

And their connection to being a mentor is how their treasure trove of wise and rich insights, mix of quotes and sayings together with a motley mix of perspectives invite reflective thought, enrich meanings, and even excite our motivation.

Granted they might not be so good at goal setting, personalised action planning, holding us accountable and other elements of a typical mentor. But I still believe they offer a wealth of opportunity and to illustrate I've provided the following mix of song lyrics within an array of different themes relevant to experiencing life. And with each set of lyrics I've included some questions to help broaden the context of the lyrics.

In sharing a focus on lyrics I'd like to mention that I never dismiss the emotive power of its complementary partner ... the music score itself. As per the words of the famous pianist Johann Bach ... It is the special province of music to move the heart. And perhaps this ability to communicate message beyond words is what makes it a powerful means of influence. Certainly this is what J.K. Rowling thought for not even the magic within her world of Harry Potter could surpasse it:

Hello ... a simple yet important word that has often started many relationships. A word that we can sometimes skip over and take for granted despite its value in helping us honour the other person and in evoking a greeting full of meaning.

In Fiji they say Bulla with head held high, in Japan they bow and say Konnichiwa (a shortened phrase of what was traditionally used within a longer greeting more specific to the context in which it was used).

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