‘Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.’
- Katherine Mansfield, NZ writer

I watched the faces of my online songwriting class blanche when I told them what their assignment for the week was: take another classmate’s twelve bar blues progression and write your own top line to it. 

It was an exercise in how songwriters can take the same ‘ingredients’ and write very different songs, plus it was a…