The Magic of Songwriting Club:

A space for NYC artists to test chords + chemistry

Find the right collaborator for your original song is like finding the perfect wine for your homemade dish. The second Sunday of every month, you can go wine tasting (metaphorically speaking) at Funkadelic Studios.

Your host is Sandrinne Edstrom, New York’s self-dubbed local Swedish fairy, and she’s buzzing with all the right flavors a good song needs. On the fifth floor of this West 40th Street studio, she guides total strangers through songwriting warm-ups and improv activities to help artists loosen up, trust each other, and break creative blocks. She then breaks everyone into groups to write an original song together. Writers get organized by songwriting interest, instrument, genre, and level.

“This is based on a camp that I did when I was 18,” Sandrinne said. “It was called the Grammy Museum Music Revolution Project and it was like a bunch of kids auditioned, they took in a bunch of singers, bass players, guitarists, keys players, and every day they would give us a theme, like ‘Green Day,’ or ‘Taylor Swift,’ or your song has to use ‘pins and needles,’ and then we’d get two or three hours to write a song together in a new band that they would put us in, and we would perform it at the end of the day.”

The camp inspired Sandrinne’s belief that quality can come with quantity. To her, if you write 100 songs, one of them has to be good. It’s simple probability. If songwriting is a skill that improves, a craft that always refines itself, then doing it over and over again will only yield better results.

“I went into [Songwriting Club] extremely opinionated about what I wanted it to be,” Sandrinne told me, recalling how the club began almost one year ago. “The whole step-by-step process of meeting someone at a jam, exchanging numbers, aligning/coordinating schedules, then daring to go to this stranger’s house or studio to collaborate with them is a whole journey to keep repeating in order to find your people. I wanted to find a way to make that whole undertaking a bit easier, and create a very intimate collaboration in a provided studio setting.”

The club is different from the improv jams you find all over the city, some cool examples being First Live in Bushwick or The Shrine in Harlem, where musicians wordlessly plug in to an ongoing show. All of this happens without much talking and makes for a seemingly polished performance, which is an impressive show of skill for some musicians. For others, it’s intimidating to play on-the-spot live in front of an audience. Where jams inspire a show-must-go-on kind of fortitude, Songwriting Club encourages artists to slow down their process, get messy behind closed doors, and test writer compatibility.

“So many of these spaces where musicians show up to jam or open mics are so self-centric that it kind of makes artists in New York feel this pressure, especially social media too, of like, ‘I have to do everything, I have to play every instrument, I have to do it all, and otherwise, I’m not impressive.’

"I really just want to foster this idea that you don’t actually have to do it all."

It’s actually really cool if you spent your whole life perfecting your craft on this instrument and then you can let other people who spent their whole life perfecting their craft do the other part. You don’t have to do everything.”

Songwriting Club isn’t the only place in New York where Sandrinne orchestrates musicians around her with ease. Every Wednesday she leads the wildly talented house band at Brooklyn Music Kitchen. At least once a show before the often-packed open mic begins, she builds up an improv jam with the house band, then masterfully throws a melody over top with on-the-spot lyrics and finesse. She also works as a co-writer with local bands, suggesting lyric changes and counter melodies in late-night rehearsal rooms that work with everyone’s busy schedules. 

Watching her work is a whimsical experience. Whether it’s talent, skill, or gathering the right mix of people around her, Sandrinne knows how to make magic happen. 

“I’m very selective about the people I work with because I make sure they write things I really admire,” Sandrinne shared. 

“The thing that I most look for is if someone writes something that I don’t understand but I like. That’s perfect because obviously you’re tapping into some yin that my yang does not have.”

I asked what trends she noticed after a year of Songwriting Club.“You’d think we would run into the problem of too many chiefs all the time, but actually we run into the problem of nobody making the moves, nobody calling the shots, nobody deciding that they’re going to say, ‘The song is going to be about this, now.’ It takes too long at the beginning for the momentum to start.”

Songwriting Club is more than creativity practice, it’s collaboration practice. You might notice your own blocks in communication when you try to share an idea. Or maybe you catch that someone else is way faster at coming up with chord progressions than you. Take note of your own and others’ writing strengths in the session, because the only way to test the chemistry is to write together.

“Just because you love their music doesn’t mean you guys will work well together, because it’s about dominant personality vs. non-dominant personality. It’s about who speaks up more, who’s faster with their ideas. Some people are slow burners and need time away privately to add their juice upon your ingredient. Some people are only able to add in the moment with you, and when they get home they don’t think of anything.”

Artist teams are teams of humans like any other. Friction is natural when different personalities and creative goals come together, and not to mention the stressors of everyday life. Sandrinne recommends sticking it out when you find someone you believe in.

“You can’t give up if you have one dud with your collaborator. You can’t be like, ‘Oh we’re not meant to collaborate anymore’ if you have one session that was terrible and you didn’t agree on anything and you hate the song you wrote. It’s just a song. It’s a relationship like dating, there is going to be a day where you fight. It’s fine, you can still make other music together. I haven’t had one person that I’m like, ‘Mm I can’t write with you,’ but I have had days with my favorite collaborators where I’m like, ‘Well this was miserable and I don’t want to see you for a week, but I’ll see you later,’” she said, laughing it off.

When musicians come from so many different corners of the industry, miscommunication is bound to happen. Some play all over the city but have never seen an Apple Music Stream, while others have tens of thousands of plays online but have never played a live show. Some musicians play off charts but not sheet music, others have never actually carried more than a guitar to a venue before, and don’t realize how much they’re asking of a fill-in drummer to bring their own set.

“If you feel like somebody didn’t treat you with grace, it’s because they haven’t learned that thing yet,” Sandrinne said. Her best advice for collaborating with new musicians? “We all just need to have grace for each other.” datin

Visit the Songwriting Club Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/sandrinne1/?hl=en

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