Behind the Scenes at the 2016 Belfast Nashville Songwriters Festival

It is not every day that you can sit in a hotel lobby in Belfast, Northern Ireland, eating a traditional Irish breakfast of rashers and black pudding, while Jim Lauderdale and Gary Burr sit at a table right next to you. Such is the beauty of an event like the 12^th United Airlines Belfast Nashville Songwriters Festival & Convention, held March 2 through 6 of this year.

When you think of Belfast, Northern Ireland, you probably think of rolling green hills, the Titanic, and a history that stretches back millennia. What you probably do not think of is a vibrant musical culture that includes everyone from Van Morrison to The Clash to Led Zeppelin to Snow Patrol. Like their music, the society of the Irish has been shaped by the decades of violence known as the Troubles, where the Irish fought against the British to achieve full independence for the six counties still controlled by the United Kingdom. Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, was the center of the conflict. This year marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the Easter Rising, when the Irish rose up against the British and began their fight for independence, and Ireland is hosting many events to commemorate the occasion.

Unlike Belfast, Nashville, Tennessee, does not have quite the same political history, but that did not stop the two cities from coming together as sister cities, promoting cultural and commercial union across international borders. Panarts, a Northern Irish company devoted to promoting the culture of Northern Ireland, used this connection in 2004 to create the Belfast Nashville Songwriters Festival & Convention,  an event where songwriters from the United States and Ireland would come together in Belfast to share their music, network, and learn from their fellow songwriters. Irish writers would then travel to Nashville to meet with publishers and other music executives, as well as perform on Music City Roots and at the famous Bluebird Café.

This year, the twelfth annual event in Belfast featured headlining shows from big name artists like Stephen Bishop and a broadcast of Music City Roots live from the Empire Music Hall. It also featured successful writers in a series of intimate rounds: Bishop; Iain Archer, who was recently nominated for a Grammy for his hit “Hold Back the River” with James Bay; Scottish duo Gallagher & Lyle; Nashville songwriting couple Gary Burr and Georgia Middleman; and Belmont University songwriting professors James Isaac Elliott and Drew Ramsey.

The pair of James Elliott and Drew Ramsey is how I managed to visit Ireland over my spring break. James Elliott is currently the chair of the songwriting department in the Mike Curb College of Entertainment & Music Business at Belmont University. He has had nearly one hundred of his songs recorded, with several of them topping the charts. He first went to the BelNash festival in 2014 as a speaker and performer and has been back every year since. Drew Ramsey is a Grammy-winning songwriter and professor of songwriting at Belmont, with songs like Marc Broussard’s “Home” and Jonny Lang’s “Turn Around” in his repertoire.

During a Belmont study abroad program to Ireland with Elliott in the summer of 2015, I attended a small writers round organized by Colin Magee and Anne Coulter, the founders of the BelNash festival, featuring local Irish writers, and a few of the songwriting students on the program. After his past success at the festival and friendship with Magee and Coulter, Elliott was able to create a study abroad program for eight students to attend and perform at the festival during spring break in 2016. As a graduating senior and songwriter, I felt that this program was a good opportunity to network with industry professionals during my last semester, so I jumped at the chance to return to Ireland.

The eight Belmont students, along with Elliott and Ramsey, left Nashville on Thursday night and arrived in Belfast midday on Friday, March 4, just in time for the live broadcast of Music City Roots from the Empire Music Hall. Music City Roots brought their entire crew over to Belfast and featured Nashville songwriter Jim Lauderdale and Ralph McLean as the emcees of the evening. The show also featured performances from Lauderdale, Shenandoah Valley artist Scott Millar, Iain Archer, and Gallagher & Lyle among others. Despite the huge names on the bill, the highlights came from the two starting acts, Ciara O’Neill and Brigid O’Neill and Sam Wickens and Amanda Agnew. The O’Neills performed traditional Irish songs to start the show and Wickens and Agnew gave an absolutely haunting and delightful rendition of the traditional song “Nora Lee” interspersed with the Elvis classic “Love Me Tender.”

The convention featured several seminars from industry veterans like Gary Burr as well as Elliott and Ramsey. Ramsey’s seminar was titled “Kickstarting Your Co-Writes,” where he provided tips on how to jumpstart co-writing sessions, sharing stories from his career with Marc Broussard and Robert Randolph and highlighting features of computer applications like Logic and GarageBand that could be used to bring out song ideas.

Other festivals tend to use multiple stages for the musical performances, but BelNash centers the festival on small writers rounds, featuring the American and Irish writers coming together to perform their songs in an intimate setting. Even the biggest round, the BelNash Birthday Bash, featuring nine writers, was held in one of the ballrooms of the Clayton Hotel. Out of the rounds that I attended, the one that attracted the most attention featured Stephen Bishop, Iain Archer, and Eoin O’Callaghan, also known as Best Boy Grip, held in the Empire Music Hall. Two of the other rounds featured Belmont’s Elliott and Ramsey along with four Irish writers in small conference rooms in the Clayton’s conference center. The last event of the festival was the aforementioned Birthday Bash, which featured nine writers in three separate rounds and featured Nashville hit writers Sonia Leigh and Kevin Gordon, Elliott and Ramsey, and four other Irish writers, including 20-year-old Sam Wickens, whose songs certainly do not reflect his young age.

The eight Belmont students participated in a separate writers round on Saturday night, where we each had the opportunity to play two of our songs alongside two of Belfast songwriter Peter McVeigh’s students from the music program at the Belfast Metropolitan College. It was surprising to see such diversity in a small group, but that is the beauty of how students were chosen for this trip. Just within the group of eight Belmont students, our writing styles ranged from folk to pop country to indie to storyteller rock. I personally bonded with one of the Belfast Met students over a mutual admiration for the work of Bruce Springsteen. By the time the music started, it was standing room only, and even that was scarce.

The main events of the festival were certainly incredible and unique, but the true charm of having so many talented writers and musicians in the same place happens behind the scenes after all of the rounds have ended. After the Belmont round, fellow student Mitch McLaughlin and I went down to the lobby of the Clayton, where the man who ran our sound handed us his guitar and threw us into an impromptu jam session with several Irish musicians. After I played one of the originals I had played during the round, one of the Irishmen sitting around turned to me and said, “We heard you’re from New Jersey. You can’t leave until you play Bruce Springsteen.” As a Springsteen fan, I happily obliged that request and Mitch and I ended up staying in the lobby until about 2:30am, playing along to some traditional Irish songs (which the Irish were very surprised that I knew) and leading the group in barroom renditions of songs like Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer,” Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” and Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.”

The next night, long after the festival-closing Birthday Bash, some of the Belmont students gathered in a corner of the hotel and started playing covers just for fun. As the night wore on, we were joined by our professors Elliott and Ramsey, Belfast Met teacher and songwriter Peter McVeigh, Nashville writers Gary Burr and Georgia Middleman, and some of the crew from Music City Roots. Playing a writers round at a festival centered around songwriters was an amazing experience, but nothing can really compare to sitting in a hotel bar casually playing original songs for some of the most successful songwriters in the world.

The next day, McVeigh invited the eight Belmont students to speak and perform for his songwriting class at the Belfast Met. We each performed one of our originals and talked to the Irish students about music and songwriting. While not an official festival event, it was still rewarding to hear from the students and talk to them about something that everybody in the room was passionate about.

The week after the festival wrapped in Belfast, six Irish writers, Ciara O’Neill, Sam Wickens, Simon Murphy, Ryan McMullan, Brigid O’Neill, and Eoin O’Callaghan (Best Boy Grip), flew to Nashville with Colin Magee and Anne Coulter to make appearances around town and meet with industry professionals. They performed all over the city, including the Bluebird Café, Music City Roots in Franklin, and the Curb Café on the campus of Belmont University. After their Music City Roots performance, where three of the writers did a once-rehearsed version of U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” Ciara O’Neill and Ryan McMullan sat down with Music City Roots producer Craig Havighurst and discussed their experience in Nashville. O’Neill explained that Belfast does not have any kind of formal music industry like Nashville and believes that, for all of the Irish writers that came over, coming across the Atlantic Ocean opens up so many opportunities for them and that true success in the music business is actually achievable in Nashville.

During his writers round, Drew Ramsey said that, as songwriters, “We write the world that we want to create.” Songwriters are a unique group of people with a gift that allows us to express our emotions, hopes, desires, and dreams in a way that everyone can understand and relate to. Every kid with a guitar who sits down and writes a few stanzas and throws a few chords on top of those stanzas longs for the day when his or her work can be put out in public or when he or she could play their songs in a hotel bar for Gary Burr or eat breakfast next to Jim Lauderdale. Music is a universal language that transcends international borders and brings people together, much like how the Belfast Nashville Songwriters Festival brings American and Irish writers together to celebrate something that they all are passionate about.

Also, please check out every Irish and American writer I have mentioned, as well as up-and-coming Nashville songwriters and Belmont students Jackie Steil, Mitch McLaughlin, Josh Birdsong, Grace Guggenheim, Taylor Puskar, Hannah Rand, and Noelle Bangert.

As the Irish say, sláinte!