2024 Portland Annual Songwriting Challenge

September 2024

My English teacher introduced me to the Portland Annual Songwriting Challenge and I had a blast participating. The Songwriting Challenge took place from September 8 to September 14, and for seven days a new prompt would come out. The prompts came out in the following order: The title is the name of a car, Write a poem first, Recurring dream, Write a country song, Tempo or key change, Write a jingle or theme song, What you wanted to be when you grew up. It was the first time I had done anything like the challenge and being on a time crunch helped me embrace the fact that it is ok for things to not be perfect. In my experiences writng songs previously, I oftentimes struggled with dealing with a creative slump where I would run out of ideas for a song. Having the designated prompts and time restraints actually made it easier to come up with ideas and I found that I did not often get stuck writing lyrics. The prompts “The title is the name of a car” and “Write a poem first” were my favorite prompts and led to some of my favorite songs that I have written. The greatest struggle for me throughout the whole challenge was recording the songs because the lyrics and chords were so fresh. For the prompt “Tempo or key change,” the key change I created was so difficult to perform that I had to come back the day after the song was due to get a good recording of the song. Overall, I had a great time participating in the Portland Annual Songwriters challenge and have learned many things about my abilities as a songwriter. You can check out the different songs that I wrote based on the prompts on my Instagram!