All right.
What a treat.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, big thanks to all of you guys
for coming out for this event.
Thanks so much to Tyler for making this happen.
This is a huge--
yeah, just hugely exciting opportunity
to get to share these songs.
So just a little bit of background,
the songs that I'll be singing today
are all written by non-speaking autistic writers.
We're putting out a compilation album of songs
by these amazing lyricists coming out
within the next week or so called Silently Loud.
And it was funded by the Minnesota State Arts Board.
We were able to go into a recording studio
up there in the Twin Cities, work
with a bunch of great awesome producers, a bunch
of great studio musicians to really give these the full rock
and roll treatment that they deserve because they're
amazing, amazing tunes.
So I will serenade you with them now,
but also I hope everyone will check out the record.
And there's string arrangements, full drums, bass, keyboard,
electric guitar, the whole thing.
And I really want to just reiterate
a couple of the things that these slides were saying
as folks were sitting down.
I think that these writers that I--
I basically think I have the best job in the world
that I get to collaborate with these incredible poets
and lyricists.
For those of you who aren't familiar with this way
of communicating, these awesome folks
are using, often using, what are called letter boards that
are like a laminated piece of paper that
has the alphabet on it.
And they're spelling out what they
want to say one letter at a time,
starting out with some support, and then gradually working
to totally autonomous spelling.
And for me, as a poet, it is so amazing, so
impressive to watch you guys do what you do,
and to see how much intense not only like thought is going
into the words that you're saying, but also into the motor
control that's necessary, and eye tracking that's necessary
to point to each individual letter.
And for those of us in the audience who are maybe
practicing poets, who are neurotypical poets, just
imagining-- like, imagine the labor
that it takes to write a poem, and then
add that to the motor challenges of trying
to bring your focus to the board and to spell that
out one letter at a time.
It's so impressive and so beautiful to watch.
And as a result, I think that the language
that's coming out of that process
is so carefully thought out.
Poets talk about laboring over every word,
but this is such a literal, incredible, amazing labor.
And the choices that are informing
these uses of language, I think that it'll
be clear from the songs that there's
just so much intention and so much
energy going into this writing.
Just as far as the process goes, all of these lyrics
are written by the students themselves.
I'm only sort of offering some scaffolding, suggestions
about where things might rhyme, where some things might repeat,
but it's really, totally the language of the student.
And then the part that makes my job
so fun is that then once we have the lyrics written,
I ask the writer, what do we want the song to sound like?
What are some sort of-- either some sound-alike songs?
You want it to sound like Taylor Swift.
You want to sound like Jonas Brothers.
You want to sound like Bruce Springsteen.
We get that in a lot.
Thank goodness.
And so, then there's this kind of fun
back and forth with the writer of trying
to get a musical presentation that matches the version of it
that they have in their mind.