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Katie Dahl Discusses the Art of Crafting a Song

Katie Dahl thumbs through her songwriting notebook, finding the pages where she penned lyrics and chose the title for her song “Paper Birds and Leaky Boats.” Photo by Sally Slattery.

During her freshman year of college, Katie Dahl slipped on ice and broke her wrist. “I used to play the oboe, but I couldn’t play for awhile. I had all this extra time so I started playing guitar.” That same year she penned her first song lyrics.

“I thought I had arrived. I thought if anyone heard it they would know that this is a songwriter to be reckoned with,” laughs the national-touring musician with two albums to her name. “I look back now and it was horrible! It was overwrought, not well-crafted.”

That was ten years and many scribbled-in notebooks ago. Since then Dahl has graced many stages, coffee houses, restaurants, and homes with her fresh, folksy tunes. “I’ve been to songwriting workshops along the way, and they’ve been really helpful,” she says. “But I think it’s something you just have to start to do on your own.”

In 2009, seven years since her first attempt at songwriting, Dahl released her first CD, County Line. “I basically put every song I’d ever written on that CD,” she says. When she released her second and most recent album last year, Leaky Boats and Paper Birds, Dahl created a deadline for herself. “I had to hole myself up,” she says. “I went on a writers’ retreat in Albuquerque for a week and worked on songs. I had a bunch that were started, but it’s really hard for me to finish songs.”

This song (see below) was no different. “Leaky Boats and Paper Birds,” the title track of her recent album, took many hours to craft. She researched, self-reflected, practiced, rearranged, and practiced some more.

The inspiration for the song came after Dahl attended a performance of My Fair Lady in a Chicago suburb. “I think the American musical is one of the great things in America,” Dahl smiles. While reflecting on the production, she also thought of the current state of the country. “I think it’s really easy to get depressed about the direction of the country, no matter what side of the aisle you are on. So, I was driving in this Chicago suburb and it wasn’t really pretty but suddenly there were really pretty clouds and birds flying and I had just seen this play and I thought, these are good things, this is America too.”

Soon after, Dahl opened her songwriting notebook. “I made a list of the things I thought were good: the WPA, Southern hospitality, birthday parties, ice cream, “Car Talk,” compost piles,” she laughs, “sprinklers making rainbows, I Love Lucy. That’s where the song came from.”

She calls the song a “factual discussion” of her family, her philosophy. The song includes reference her cousin, Mark Carlson, a cherry farmer in Sister Bay, as well as her mother, a seminary professor in Minnesota.

Dahl works on song lyrics with a guitar nearby. Photo submitted.

“I wrote the song in order, which is unusual,” explains Dahl. “I started with the verse about my cousin, then [wrote] the verse about my mom, and then I thought I needed another verse. You want to finish strongest – go either up or in and there’s nothing to top them other than God or me,” she laughs, “so I went with me.”

“So, I thought,” she continues, “if my cousin’s a farmer and he works with the land, and my mom is a person of spirituality and she works with God, what am I? I’m a person of words.”

Dahl believes that words are an important, effective tool, especially in the political realm. “It’s a song about naming things – you can name things good or you can name them as bad. It’s not an empty thing to speak. I think it’s really important to speak well, to talk with intention and carefully.”

The song also references politics, which Dahl is careful to explain before she performs the song. “People might tune in during the middle and think it’s something different than it is,” she says. “I mean the song not to be a partisan song. I talk about my mom being a leftist and I am too, but that’s not the point, the point is whatever cause we’re passionate about we ought to speak well about that cause and put our actions behind our words.”

Dahl admits that the song can make people uncomfortable, but her use of humor disarms that discomfort. “I needed it to be funny, it needed to not sound angry,” she says, “otherwise you alienate people and they stop listening.”

Dahl often introduces a new song to her fiancé and fellow musician Rich Higdon before she performs it for an audience. “He has to use a sandwich mode of criticism,” laughs Dahl. “He has to say something positive before and after he says anything negative.”

Once she believes the song is complete, she will play it for an audience. “Even if I still want to edit [the song], it can help to see people’s reaction.”

Because Door County is a “small town,” Dahl admits the difficulty in presenting her original lyrics, which can have her feeling very vulnerable and exposed to friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers. “It’s hard enough to know your mom is going to know something that happened in your life, much less everyone you see at the post office,” laughs Dahl. “But it’s the price you pay. I think it’s important not to let what people are going to think stop me from writing something.”

Dahl hopes for a productive songwriting season ahead. She is quick to admit that the craft is still a struggle and encourages others who are interested to simply take up the pen and go for it.

“I think people have a lot of blocks about creative things and they think, ‘Oh, you’re that kind of person.’ I am here to say that I am not that kind of person,” says Dahl. “I’m the kind of person that is good at math. I’m a very left brained person who has stretched herself to be a right brained person.”

Katie Dahl performs regularly throughout Door County, including weekly at the White Gull Inn (Tuesdays from 5 – 8 pm), The Cookery (Wednesdays beginning June 26 from 8 – 11 pm), and the Inn at Kristofer’s (Mondays and Thursdays from 6 – 9 pm).

To learn more about Dahl and her music, visit http://www.katiedahlmusic.com.

Dahl also co-wrote American Folklore Theatre’s production of Victory Farm, which premiered last year and will run again this fall at Door Community Auditorium.

Writing for a musical, Dahl says, “is a whole different world of songwriting.”

Leaky Boats and Paper Birds

Lyrics by Katie Dahl

My cousin is a lover of the land

He picks his tomatoes with a weather-beaten hand

He’s got sweet annie in September and sour cherries in July

He’s got a name for every color in the sky

And I don’t know just how he makes ends meet

Selling sacks of tomatoes for two bucks apiece

He just turns toward the south when the north wind blows

Keeps walking slow and straight and steady down the rows

You say this country has been lost to those who see the land just for its profit and its cost

But I claim it for my cousin cause he’s touched it with his hands

And my cousin is a lover of the land

My mother is a woman of God

She believes in the comfort of the staff and the rod

She swears by love, she swears unkindness is a sin

Sometimes she swears just like a sailor drinking gin

She tells me it is well with my soul

And she tells me it’s the mysteries that one day make us whole

She says that some bright morning she will fly away from here

If those damn Republicans win again next year

You say this country’s gone to hell with those who think that righteousness is something you can sell

But I claim it for the ones who know what true grace can afford

Like my mother, who’s a woman of the Lord

And I am a believer in these words

I fold these lines of mine into little paper birds

And if I make them true and keep them pointing toward the sky

Then I trust that one day they will fly

I have heard it said that talk is cheap

That it’s like trying to cross the ocean in a tiny boat that leaks

Well, if you’re ever gonna make it to the ocean’s farther shore

You find the leaks, you pay the seams, you grab an oar

You say this country’s been betrayed by the huckster’s sleight of hand and the congressman’s charade

But I claim it for these little leaky boats and paper birds

For I am a believer in these words, my mother is a woman of God, and my cousin is a lover of the land