[APPLAUSE]
All right, what a treat.
I suspect that most folks here are familiar with spelling
as a form of communication.
But just in case there are any folks
who have happened upon us without knowing what the heck is
going on, just to give a little background,
I've been working with spellers for about 10 years.
My background is in creative writing.
I studied poetry throughout undergrad, masters, PhD,
and started working with autistic community
about a decade ago.
And these are just such amazing writers
that I get to collaborate with, many of the folks
who are here today and then an incredibly rich community
of writers across the country.
But when we're doing these songs, everything
I'm going to share, I want to make it really clear
that these are written completely by the non-speakers
that I work with.
I'm not writing any of the lyrics.
I'm giving suggestions of maybe where some rhymes could
go, giving some instruction about how songs are constructed
and what makes a song work.
But really, all of the text is completely
composed by the spellers.
They're making the choices about what rhyme words
they're going to use.
They're making the choices about what the topics and themes are
going to be.
And then once we have the lyrics,
they give me music direction, explain either
in terms of a sound like, oh, can you
make it sound like Bruce Springsteen or Taylor Swift
or whatever, or descriptive words,
can you make it like fast or can you make it mournful
or can you make it exciting or whatever.
Sometimes they get very poetic ones.
One of my very favorites of all time actually is from Aulton.
He said, can you make it sound like a moose covered in frost.
And that was such a good such a good music direction.
But anyway, the songs that I'll share here
are a mixture of ones-- some written at previous Teva
camps up in Prescott with spellers who live here
in Arizona, and then some are from a compilation album
that we put out that we were celebrating the last time I
was here called Silently Loud.
That was funded by the Minnesota State Arts Board,
and it's a full band record of songs also written by spellers,
and then closing with a couple new ones
by some other friends in the mix.