The boss at work or the volunteer co-ordinator at your organization has a great project for you. They want all the staff or volunteers to gather with Gibsons musician Lowry Olafson one day and sing together while working on writing a theme song. It's an exercise in team building, they tell you.
Oh sure, you mutter, I can't sing, and what crazy idea is this? Most of the people who attend Olafson's ThemeShop, a song writing workshop, enter with apprehension and doubt.
"There's a huge level of scepticism at first, but it's a transformational experience," he said. "Usually one person in the group has organized it - one person who trusts in the process and brings in the others."
In one of the first ThemeShop sessions, Susan Ferron of Sechelt's Insightful Visions brought in Olafson to develop an advertising song with the staff.
Love How You Look was the result, an appropriate song for a business that sells improved eyesight. During the session, the lyrics moved from a sales pitch to something deeper: "Know who you are/when you look at what you love."
As the participants work on a song that describes what they want to convey to the world, they loosen up, and soon they are suggesting lyrics, listening to Olafson's melodies and working with their colleagues. Science has discovered that when people sing together as a group, their levels of oxytocin, the love and cuddle hormone, are released in the body. That may explain their satisfaction, but the experience also owes a lot to collaboration with Olafson.
After a session at a library in Fernie, one ThemeShop participant described him as a magician.
"Somehow he was able to corral the creativity of 38 people from Grade 4 to senior age and form two verses and a chorus for our library song, all within three hours."
With his experience at song writing for groups - earned by offering workshops to kids in hundreds of schools from here to Saskatchewan - Olafsoncan surmount office politics or petty issues and develop a theme song that says it all.
"We go through a powerful process," he said. "We're by turns elated or grumpy. The songs capture what the group is all about."
At the end of the session, the groups will own their song. They can use it for an advertising jingle, or they can sing it in public to raise funds or awareness. Olafson has been invited to libraries, retreat weekends and an organization called Blind Beginnings that supports blind youth. That particularsong packed an emotional wallop. I See Differently is the title.
"For the song to be good, it has to choke me up at some point," laughs Olafson.
He recently completed a session with a group of people who have aphasia along with staff and students from the University of British Columbia School of Audiology and Speech Sciences in the university's Aphasia Mentoring Program. Aphasia is an acquired communication disorder caused by damage to the language areas of the brain. It does not affect intelligence.
Together Olafson and the group produced a song that starts with the lyric: "It isn't always clear, what I mean to say." It goes on to ask us to listen with our hearts and maybe we'll understand. Message received.
The Sechelt Rotary Club has also experienced song writing together. Their creation, A Better Place, has lots of heart. They sing about flipping burgers at community events and hammering shelters locally, but also about what they do on a larger scale, bringing clean water and education to others.
"It completely captured what they were all about," Olafson said.
His next project is with the Coast's Dragon Boat Club, then he goes on the road as a touring musician, and will facilitate a ThemeShop in Calgary with that city's Immigrant Women's Association.
More about the program can be found at www.ThemeShop.ca.
