In this episode it was great to catch up with Margaret Lewis who is literally at the very start of her songwriting journey. Margaret stopped by for a chat with Jo Evans who was the subject of last week's episode.

Margaret has spent her whole life loving music and singing in choirs and in her words she's "wanted to write songs for a long time but didn't have the intestinal fortitude". Recently she decided to take on her internal critic and give songwriting a go!

She's checked out lots of online resources such as the website https://howtowritesongs.org/about/ which have provided a lot of useful guidance. Most importantly she has found people who can encourage, advise and support her to jump over the hurdle of writing her first songs. Connecting with people through songwriting has been a very rewarding experience for Margaret.

She has sung in choirs with Jo, felt naturally drawn to singing harmonies and has written harmonies to some of Jo's original songs. Jo acknowledged how Margaret's harmonies take Jo's songs to another level and give her more confidence to perform them live.

Margaret finds the harmonies come very naturally when she's listening to Jo's songs but she needs to write them down and record them on her phone as they come to her or they get lost!

Jo and Margaret performed live a wonderful acoustic version of Jo's song "Battle On" about the efforts of firefighters in the 2019 bushfires.

For Margaret songwriting is a different and new way of expressing herself and extending her creative writing. She's loving it and cannot recommend highly enough to others - just give it a go!

it was a great pleasure to chat with Margaret and hear her insights from the songwriting starting line.