Victoria Banks has been a professional singer/songwriter for 25 years and teaches songwriting at Nashville’s Belmont University. She will be singing and performing in Moose Jaw on April 29 and shared some of what she’s going to tell high school students at Peacock’s Centennial Auditorium.
“We’ll talk about the process of songwriting, we’ll talk about the importance of creativity,” Banks said. “I’m a big proponent of using songwriting in therapeutic ways, as well as in straight-up creative ways or in marketable ways.”
Banks works with several organizations that teach songwriting as therapy. One of those organizations pairs songwriters with military veterans, helping them write through their trauma.
“We basically create songs out of their experiences,” she said. “I’ve seen firsthand what that can do for people who have been through trauma or are struggling in their lives.”
Banks will join collaborators Emily Shackelton, Phil Barton, and Jeff Cohen for Music Row at the Mae at 7:30 p.m. on April 29. The evening will be hosted by producer Joel Stewart, also a member of River Street Promotions, which organized the event.
Tickets are still available from Sasktix.ca.
The four Nashville singer/songwriters will be performing in support of youth mental wellness. Proceeds from the event will support mental wellness programming in Moose Jaw’s school divisions.
Emily Shackelton has also spoken with MooseJawToday.com – That article can be read here.
The morning of the 29th, there will be a preshow exclusively for high school students from Moose Jaw and area in the Peacock Auditorium. Banks is looking forward to speaking with students and giving them another tool for staying as mentally healthy as they can.
“I’ve personally struggled in my life, I have a history of mental illness in my family,” Banks said. “Songwriting has been crucial for me in my self-expression and in the way that I process the things that happened to me. So, I want to make sure that kids understand the importance of music and creativity in self-expression.”
Banks will also speak about the life of a professional songwriter. The career has more to it than people might suspect.
Her teaching office is right on Music Row, where she also works as a songwriter and where many of her students will go on to work. It’s a competitive program to get into, she said. Most students want to be their own artists, while others want to write for established artists. Both groups need the same broad set of music-making skills.
“We teach them all the different structures in songwriting, the different styles of writing in different genres. We teach them all about how the different contracts work, all of the background legal stuff,” Banks said.
Songwriters can’t only write the lyrics – they have to be able to create a professional-sounding recording complete with music. They’re taught how to use digital audio workstations to engineer their sound. The career’s stages end up being songwriter-singer-musician-producer. The finished song is then pitched to publishing houses, and artists decide if they want to re-record it.
Still, the most important part of songwriting is also what makes it therapeutic and healing – letting go of self-criticism and embracing creativity.
“You have to put yourself in situations where you can just freely express yourself, and there’s no such thing as a bad idea,” Banks said. “You don’t have to self-edit. The most important step is that brainstorming right at the beginning… it’s very important not to second-guess and question yourself in that process, but to let the flow happen.”
“You have to be willing to just write a lot of crap, basically. And that is what will create the fuel for your brilliant ideas. People get caught up in that fear of the blank page, you know, the writer’s block – all of that stuff comes from a fear of not being good enough, but in our creativity, we’re tapping into something that’s bigger than we are… and we just have to tap into that source and trust that it’s there.”
Victoria Banks is from Muskoka, Ontario. She has won multiple awards, been called “one of the best songwriters in the business” by Nashville’s MusicRow magazine, had her songs recorded by over 100 artists and featured on TV and in movies, and has self-produced four solo albums.
Find out more about her on her website at victoriabanks.net/biography.
