Michael Peter Smith was such an outstanding teacher of songwriting — intense yet light-hearted, it seemed to me. In recognition of what would have been his 80th birthday today, here in two 30-minute videos is his lecture-demonstration called “Writing Songs for Shows,” recorded with permission at Lamb’s Retreat for Songwriters, in 2016. Michael talked about his creative process, with examples from musicals he had written including the Tony-award-winning Grapes of Wrath, Moby Dick, and The Snow Queen. The links for these 2 episodes with Michael are https://youtu.be/w_Rc2ZWbrqA (part one) and https://youtu.be/wJGesRzW5gY(part two). These videos were broadcast on my long-running public-access tv program, Songwriters Open Mic. There are over two hundred half-hour programs on the Youtube Channel for “Songwriters Open Mic Ann Arbor.” Lamb’s Retreat for Songwriters is an annual event held in November at Harbor Springs, Michigan, by springfed (dot) org.
Here is a run-down of each episode:
Part One—
2:30 writing for shows as “a way to write songs”.
6:50 About The Snow Queen
10:50 the genesis of the song Love Letter on a Fish
16:45 how to be more prolific
21:10 performance, Love Letter on a Fish
25:00 extraordinary rhymes and “the amount of labor”
Part Two —
2:30 Aaron Copland’s remarks about writing music to prose
5:00 Opal Whiteley; performance of Brown Leaves
8:00 Melville, arranging phrases
10:30 performance, Macey and He’s Stark Dead
13:00 John Prine quote on fixing things
15:00 when comments from other people won’t do you any good
17:30 how to record yourself and listen back, as a “third person”
19:30 
two performances from the Staff Concert: Accokeek, and The Dutchman.