Being stuck inside all day might be wearing you and your kids down, but there’s never been a better time to encourage them to pick up their musical instrument and get stuck into writing songs. Mike Chunn from Play It Strange explains how. 

Mums and dads and households with teenage children. New Zealand is full of them. And they are finding it all very quiet right now.

The spinning wheels of that domestic environment have been under the brake recently. While the reason behind it is serious, the national quietude in our households also represents something of an opportunity.

Our passion for sporting and fitness pursuits finds homes in gerrymandered gyms, runs and bike rides and old All Blacks games on TV. But what about the mind? Is there a better time than right now to focus on an imaginative pursuit like playing a musical instrument, writing a short story or painting a watercolour?

As for our teenagers, a lot of them will know how to play a musical instrument. Many may be looking at the family piano. The piano stares back, its black and white keys wait patiently for something to happen. You can almost hear it calling out for some action. 

“PLAY ME!”

Our teenagers should be writing songs. 

Songwriting requires striding over a threshold of confidence. It’s looking at the world and writing words that sum up in colour and metaphor what is happening out there, or in the mind. Weaving through those words is the mystery of music. We all know how they fit together because every living New Zealander has heard thousands of songs in their life, many of which they hold dear until their dying day.

It seems to me, here in the Play It Strange world of secondary school songwriting competitions across New Zealand, that the parents of young songwriters find that craft to be one that borders on impossible. It’s not. It just needs to begin. 

During my days at Sacred Heart College, some time ago, Tim Finn, my brother Geoffrey and I gave it a shot. We recorded five originals (sorry but they are under lock and key) and found that songwriting is an evolutionary process. You start out in an exciting, naive fashion. Would you want to post on YouTube a video of you playing in your first game of rugby? Your debut cricket match aged eight? The first time you tried shot-put and it landed on your foot? No. Same with songwriting. You begin, finish a song, move onto the next.

The opportunity to explore, concoct, reflect, imagine, proclaim, invent, and summarise the world you live in – it’s all there to be had. The words that can be drawn on; they are in a teenager’s head just waiting patiently to be put in an engaging order. And then the excitement of music, all those notes are there too. They are waiting their turn to be played.

Songwriting is a unique and vibrant activity and right now young New Zealanders are isolated and have time on their hands. Let’s encourage them to fire up their imaginations and write songs. 

Five songwriting tips for beginners:

1. It’s important that the song you write answers three questions. Keep them pinned to the wall as you tell your story: Who is talking? To whom? And why?

2. You’re going to need a chord structure. Try finding the sheet music to a song you love (I recommend musicnotes.com), then turn it upside down and play the chords backwards. Easy – there’s a chord structure. Make adjustments as you see fit.

3. Use metaphors. My brother Geoffrey wrote a song where the first line goes: “Like rust in my car, you hold the thing together.” I reckon that’s a lot better then if he’d written: “Our relationship is shabby despite your trying to make it good.” Metaphors are crucial.

4. Seek feedback, and not just from your family and best friends. If you have a music teacher, email it to them and ask what they think. Act on their responses.

5. Take five songs you love and analyse everything about them. What is it that makes them special? Draw on what you discover. Be a sponge.

And there you are – you’re away!

Siouxsie Wiles on the vitriolic correspondence she’s received since the Covid-19 outbreak struck, and the realities of communicating evidence.

I recently received an email and text from someone telling me they are planning to email my boss, the University of Auckland vice chancellor. They are going to ask for me to “be brought before the University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee” for my “continued failure to recommend the use of face masks” to stop the spread of Covid-19.

They go on to say that this makes me “grossly irresponsible, negligent and deserving of formal censure by the University”. This isn’t the first time I’ve been contacted by this person in the last few weeks, and it turned out it wasn’t the last.

When I got their text, I didn’t quite understand why they wanted me censured by the university’s human ethics committee. But they explained their reasoning in the email. They believe that my public statements around the use of masks – I’ve endeavoured as best I can to explain both the advantages and potential disadvantages around mask wearing – have been “instrumental in creating and supporting” an experiment in which the “people of New Zealand are unwittingly involved”. And that makes me a “complicit” and “unethical experimenter” even if I’m not actually running the experiment myself.

One of my jobs as a scientist and science-communicator is to read studies, understand and evaluate the evidence, and then be able to explain it to you. With Covid-19 we are trying to understand a virus and disease we’ve never encountered before. That means some of the studies and evidence we are using to make decisions on are based on viruses like influenza and the coronavirus that caused SARS. But those viruses are not responsible for Covid-19.

In other words, there are many gaps in our knowledge. No one would deny this. Some of those gaps are due to decades of underfunding of infectious diseases research. And some are because the experiments are almost impossible to do. But now that the virus responsible for Covid-19 – SARS-CoV-2 – can be grown in the lab, researchers all around the world are desperately trying to fill in as many of those gaps as they can. Others are using mathematical models to understand the pandemic and how it is playing out in different countries as they do different things to try to bring the virus under control.

Meanwhile clinicians and public health researchers are documenting what happens to their patients. Sadly, that data becomes more complete and more useful the more patients there are. The results of all these studies are being published at a speed never seen before. Thousands have appeared since January.

Associate Professor Bill Hanage is an epidemiologist at Harvard. He has a good way of explaining what’s happening with Covid-19: we are having to build the plane at the same time as flying it. We are all making judgements and decisions based on the evidence at hand and on our values. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t prepared to change our minds as new evidence comes in.

Which brings me back to the reason why I haven’t been advocating for everyone in New Zealand to wear a face mask. Toby Morris and I are working on something exploring this in more depth now. There are clearly good reasons to wear a face mask. But there are also good reasons not to. And understanding those doesn’t make me grossly irresponsible or negligent. Like so much in life, things often turn out to be more complicated than we think.