There is a wonderful annual event that happens every spring in our state called the Michigan Teen Conference. This is an amazing four-day conference for teens from all around the state who have been in foster care and are preparing for life on their own in the adult world. Organized by an initiative called Fostering Success Michigan, these young women and men interact with experts to learn about important life skills like budgeting and getting health care.
And thanks to Lost Voices, this year they had the chance to learn how to express themselves in song!
The Conference was virtual this year, so youth were able to attend from all across the state. Of course, our experience converting the Lost Voices process to virtual songwriting made us a perfect fit to conduct a virtual songwriting workshop with the kids.
Since the workshop was only 45 minutes long, we were not going to have time for a lengthy topic brainstorm, so we decided to adopt the overall theme of the 2021 Conference – “Take Charge!” Then a week before the workshop, Kitty Donohoe and I sat down and wrote the chorus of a song with that theme. We made it a sea shanty, knowing that the form is wildly popular with teenagers right now thanks to star named Nathan Evans and his Tik-Tok performance of an old New Zealand sea shanty called “Wellerman.” The chorus we wrote is:
We’re in charge and standing strong
Winning as we go along
And we’re right where we belong
Now we are in charge.
The songwriting session was wonderful. We had ten highly-motivated teens on our Zoom screen, both young men and women, who immediately jumped in and wrote wonderful verses to wrap around that simple chorus. As we’ve seen many times on our Lost Voices sessions, the level of collaboration and mutual support throughout the session was fantastic.
Our time with the kids was so limited that we were not able to record their voices performing their song, so immediately after the workshop Kitty and I recorded guitar, percussion, and vocal tracks right in the Lost Voices office. Then, while our studio guru Dennis Kingsbury did all the mixing magic to make it a finished song, we created a slide show consisting of artwork from the Samaritas “Written Dreams on Paper” youth art show. Finally, Dennis tied it all together into the video you see here.
This experience was actually a new variation on our normal Lost Voices process, and I’m sure we will be using versions of it in the future. I want to thank Fostering Success Michigan, the Michigan Department of Human Services, Samaritas, and all the other people who work so hard to help these young people find their way to success in our very complicated world.
