Introduce Yourself : Seeking musical collaborator by Donna Devine

Hello everyone,

I’m Donna, an ex-pat Canadian living in the Netherlands in the quaint city of Delft.

I’ve had a love affair with words from the time I learned to read, and have worked as a journalist, educator (English literature, creative writing, journalism, ESL), translator (German and Dutch), and English language copyeditor. But in a move away from poetry and short stories, my non-work-related creative expression over the past two decades has mainly involved writing lyrics.

I don’t play an instrument or sing - although I create melodies - but have been fortunate to collaborate with musicians/composers from as far afield as Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Italy, the US, and the UK. The composers has mostly written their music around the lyrics, an approach that has worked well, with mutual feedback being given during the process. There have even been instances of '15 minutes of fame’, such as the placement of a song in a TV series episode; the licensed use of a song for a concert in Copenhagen; and a couple of wins in annual international song competitions as well as finalist placements, often for stand-alone lyrics.

However, these co-writing occasions have been outweighed by the growing number of lyrics that end up in boxes on a shelf, still longing for a musical home.

Unfortunately, a couple of my best and favourite collaborators are no longer as active, due either to ill health or a desire to spend more time on other creative pursuits.

Since October, I’ve turned to the AI tool ‘Suno’ to bring a few of the languishing lyrics to life with instrumentation and vocals. I enter prompts regarding, among other things, key, tempo, mood, genre, theme, and type of vocals and instruments. Using Audacity, I record a melody and upload it into the program. After a few iterations and additional fine-tuning of the prompts, the resulting song sounds pretty good.

Nevertheless, I prefer to collaborate with humans, and hope to find someone interested in working together occasionally, even if the interest is only in perhaps covering a song or using a particular song for a project. My lyrics are suited to a wide range of genres.

I feel a bit like an interloper, popping up here as a non-musician to a site oriented fully towards the entertainment industry and populated by seasoned and accomplished songwriters. But like many other serious albeit non-professional lyricists, I fan a tiny flame of hope that - before I shuffle off this mortal coil - a lyric or two of mine might land in a song that’s part of an artistic production of some kind, large or small.