My Experience with Cari Cole’s Signature Songwriting Course
Greg Kocis I began Cari Cole’s Signature Songwriting Course during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. At the time, I enrolled with what was called a Viewer Seat, which allowed me to observe the songwriting process but did not include direct feedback or participation with Cari herself. Unlike some of the other songwriting courses I had taken, I didn’t actually write a song with Cari during the course.
The Viewer Seat
The Viewer Seat was primarily an opportunity to observe the songwriting process and see how Cari worked with other songwriters. One part of her approach involved what I understood to be fairly in-depth, interview-style conversations with individual songwriters, where she would draw out their stories, emotions, ideas, and experiences to uncover material that could ultimately become the foundation of a song. Those interviews were private calls with the individual songwriters, so I wasn’t actually present for them. However, the process was explained and demonstrated through the broader structure of the course.
The course also included Zoom sessions with professional songwriters, which I was able to participate in and observe. These sessions gave me an opportunity to hear experienced writers discuss songwriting and the professional side of the craft, while also allowing me to interact with other participants in the program. For me, much of the value of the Viewer Seat came from being able to observe these different aspects of the songwriting world without necessarily being the person in the center of the songwriting session.
Co-Writing with Other Participants
Another interesting part of the program was its emphasis on co-writing. Cari would pair participants with other writers, including professional songwriters, with the goal of working together to complete a song. Although I wasn’t personally paired with Cari, I did meet several other writers through the course and ended up co-writing with a few of them outside of the formal class. Cari encouraged participants to continue building those relationships, and that became one of the more valuable parts of the experience for me.
One of those co-writing attempts became a memorable example of how difficult collaborative songwriting can be. At one point, I joined a co-writing project with 12 of the students from the course. Twelve people trying to write one song was, to put it mildly, a lot of cooks in the kitchen. Doing it over Zoom made the process even more challenging, especially because some of the participants were in other countries and time zones.
Before long, the group had dwindled from 12 people down to about four. Shortly after that, the entire project was abandoned. It simply became too difficult to coordinate that many people and opinions around a single song. While it wasn’t exactly a songwriting success, it was definitely an educational experience—and a pretty good lesson in why co-writing usually works better with a much smaller group.
The Pandemic and Online Music Community
Much of my experience with the course itself was therefore observational. I spent a lot of time watching other people’s songwriting sessions, participating in Zoom calls, and getting to know the other people involved. Since this was 2020, New York City was essentially shut down because of the pandemic, so I had considerably more time than usual to immerse myself in these kinds of online music communities.
I also stayed in touch with a number of people I met through Cari’s course for several years afterward. Those relationships ended up leading to some unexpected opportunities. One friend I met through the course eventually recommended Monthly.com, which would later become Studio.com, and also introduced me to Full Circle Music and the Song Chasers program. Those connections would lead me into several other songwriting and music-production experiences over the following years.
An Earlier Encounter with Cari Cole
As a side note, this wasn’t actually my first encounter with Cari Cole. I had met her roughly a decade earlier, around 2009 or 2010, at a music-business conference in New York City. So when I eventually took her songwriting course during the pandemic, I was already somewhat familiar with her work.
Looking Back
I’m not sure how Cari Cole structures the program today, or whether the Viewer Seat and co-writing process still work the same way. My experience was specifically during the 2020 pandemic, when so much of the music industry and songwriting education had moved online.
Looking back, the course was less about the songs I personally wrote during the class and more about observing the songwriting process, meeting other writers, and building relationships that continued beyond the course itself. In that sense, its impact on my songwriting journey extended well beyond the actual class.
What Came Next
After Cari Cole’s Signature Songwriting Circle, I continued my songwriting education through Studio.com (formerly Monthly.com), taking several of its songwriting and music-production courses. That became a much more hands-on part of my development as a songwriter and producer, and eventually led to several of the songs and production projects I would work on in the years that followed.
For more about that part of my journey, see my Studio.com songwriting and music-production courses page.
Learn More
You can learn more about Cari Cole’s Signature Songwriting Circle on her website: