Introduction

Here is the Crescendo Music Education Podcast – Episode 110.

This podcast is being recorded on the lands of the Turrbal people. I acknowledge them as the traditional owners of the land and pay my respects to elder’s past, present and emerging. They were the first music makers on this land.

About ‘Read the Episode’: Sometimes, we would rather skim visually than listen to a podcast! That’s a great way to learn too!
The transcript of episode 110 of The Crescendo Music Education Podcast is below.

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Debbie O’Shea 

Hello and welcome to the Crescendo Music Education Podcast Stephanie Leavell. Hello Stephanie.

Stephanie Leavell 

Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Debbie O’Shea 

It is so lovely to meet you in person, so to speak.

Stephanie Leavell 

Sort of, yeah.

Debbie O’Shea 

I’ve been binge listening to your podcast lately, and I will admit that I’ve only discovered your work relatively recently, through a lovely colleague and friend Jess Morrell. Hello, Jess, shout out. She couldn’t believe I didn’t know of you. And then I straight away went, Okay, let me find this out. And like the next day I did Blowing in the Wind with my Preps and then I did Shake-A My Egg. And I’m going, that’s it. You got a fan Stephanie.

Stephanie Leavell 

Oh, yay. That’s so nice and that’s so funny that you say that. Because I always say that if people try one of my songs, they’re probably in. That’s always my hope. I try to make sure all the songs that I release are really, truly useful, with the hope that when people try one, they will come back for more.

Debbie O’Shea 

Well, you’ve succeeded. Absolutely. So I’m going to make sure that anyone in my network that doesn’t know of you, they soon will, because they’re quite magic. And I think you’ve got to be very careful with, I know I’m going off on tangents already, with composed music, especially I’m a Kodály trained person and I really do believe that music of the folk culture and the mother tongue, should be the basis of what we do. But it doesn’t negate using excellent quality composed material. So I like to think I’m a little bit fussy, but oh my goodness, your material is amazing, and your voice.

Now I’ll go back to the beginning of my podcast, where I normally read your bio, so I’ll start with that. So Stephanie Leavell is an award winning songwriter, a music therapist and the creator of Music for Kiddos, an online education company that provides high quality music resources and continuing education for music therapists, music educators and parents. Stephanie is a Berklee College of Music graduate and is passionate about using music to help kids succeed.

She specialises in working with babies and kids through age 10. Stephanie jokes that she has a low tolerance for cheesy music. She writes music to help kids be successful in their daily life, night time routines, transitions, movement, instrument exploration, academic concepts and helping kids understand and express their feelings. What an amazing bio. That is a great bio. Is there anything else you’d like to add to that before we go on.

The Positives of Working With Kids

Stephanie Leavell 

Thanks. I mean, sure, I’ll add that I just adore kids. There’s a reason why I work with kids and there’s a reason why I tend to work with them. Oh man, give me a three year old and I love their spunk, I love their creativity, I love that they have no filter and they’ll tell you anything that they’re thinking and they’ll try anything and they’ll sing anything. I just adore kids. So everything that I do is based in a foundation of just a deep love and respect for kids.

Debbie O’Shea 

Wow, and that comes across in your work. And wouldn’t the world be a better place if everybody felt that?

Stephanie Leavell 

I think so too. Yeah, kids deserve that.

Debbie O’Shea 

They sure do. I also like to ask all of my guests about gratitude. For what are you most grateful? I just think that we all need to take time for gratitude, because many of us have these silly busy lives, but we don’t take time to stop and reflect. And I think it’s really important so I’d be really interested to hear for what you’re most grateful.

Stephanie Leavell 

Yeah, that’s an easy one for me, my family, certainly my family. I have an 11 year old daughter who I absolutely adore and she’s actually the inspiration for why I started Music for Kiddos. People say You don’t use the word kiddos. Like when I’m talking, I don’t use the word kiddos, and I say oh, because there’s just one in my mind and that’s my daughter. So I’d say kids, or I say children, or something like that, or students, but that’s the original kiddo, my daughter, Charlie. She was three when I started Music for Kiddos. And then my husband and I are childhood friends, so we basically grew up together and so the three of us have a very tight knit little family and that is absolutely who I am most grateful for. Yeah.

Debbie O’Shea 

That’s lovely. She’s a very lucky kiddo to have you as a Mum, I can tell you.

Stephanie Leavell 

Thank you.

Debbie O’Shea 

All right, I would love to hear about your compositions. How do you write them and trial them and record them and distribute them and everything? Just tell us all the things about your composing and how it came about in the first place.

Stephanie’s Compositions

Stephanie Leavell 

Yeah. So I’ve been a songwriter. I wrote my first song when I was 16. I actually didn’t really know that I was a singer or I didn’t really think of myself as too much of a musician until I was almost an older teenager. Though I grew up playing the harp and I had a musical family. So everybody was singing and everybody was writing songs, and everybody was kind of doing this thing. So I found music as kind of an older teenager, I found songwriting specifically. I remember I wrote a song and played it for my friends, and they were like, flabbergasted, and I went, Oh, I guess I can write songs.

And so that kind of launched me off in this direction of becoming a songwriter. But I’ve always been really critical of my music,  writing serious music and being really critical of it. And so I went to college for music and I studied music therapy and I really, really love being a music therapist. And when I was probably 28-29 I realised I was still writing songs, but I was just so critical of it.

And it occurred to me that if I wrote songs for children. Whatever was stopping me and giving me pause and making me worried about releasing my music and recording my music and sharing it with other people, completely went away because I was doing it for kids, and all of a sudden I could do all the silly things and the silly tricks and ideas that I had, with all the songwriting tools, without worrying so much about it, and just with having fun with it. And so I started writing music for kids and realised that it was this really, really fun outlet for me.

But I’ll tell you, I am a songwriting nerd, through and through and through and through. I think very deeply about it. I’ve taken songwriting classes and things like that, but I think a lot about things like harmonic structure and rhythm and chord progressions and melodies and song structure, not just harmonic structure, but like song structure. And a lot of what I’m doing when I’m writing songs for kids is I’m utilising what I learned in my music therapy training and in my music therapy work about how to communicate with music. So I’m thinking about the cadences and the pauses and all these various aspects of music. So if I have a wide range of kids in front of me, some of them might process the melody faster than the lyrics, some of them might process the rhythm.

So if I’m doing this playful song where there’s a stop and everybody freezes or there’s some kind of communication thing happening. Blowing in the Wind has these different things that kids do with a scarf. And some of them are silly, and some of them are more creative. And it has all these instructions, some of them are specific instructions, and some of them are open ended instructions. I think so carefully about how the music presents that and how it communicates all of that, so that the most kids possible can understand it and participate. So I would say my songs are highly communicative, and that is, I think, one reason why people sometimes say they feel a little bit magical with kids, but I think they’re just very clearly communicating what I’m hoping they will communicate.

Debbie O’Shea 

Yes, I think it’s a perfect marriage of your music knowledge and your knowledge of children and music therapy. Like they wouldn’t be as good without the depth of your music knowledge, they just couldn’t be.

Stephanie Leavell 

Thank you.

Debbie O’Shea 

Because like you were saying the cadences and that the musical integrity of what you write, it’s so deep and strong, but also they wouldn’t be as good, even with all that musical knowledge, if you didn’t have the knowledge of children and music therapy and their sensory needs, so it’s like the perfect marriage of those two areas of your skills.

Stephanie Leavell 

Thank you. I really appreciate you saying that and recognising that. That is what I aspire to do. And in my first 10 years as a music therapist, I was an improvisational music therapist. So I wasn’t writing these pre composed songs, I was improvising with kids. And I tell you I can really tune into a kid when we are making music together. So I spent 10 years doing things with music and waiting, watching for a reaction, and seeing how they would react and then taking their contributions and their ideas and putting it into songs as well. So sometimes I’ll do kind of silly stuff in music, silly words, silly movements, silly actions and things like that. And I just have an understanding of what will make kids pay attention and be engaged and be excited about songs. And sometimes it’s the silly stuff.

Debbie O’Shea 

Oh yes. A lot of the times it is silly stuff. It is, not even just as far as the music is concerned, just in the relationship. I’m reminded of a completely tangential story. There is a particular class that I teach, my surname is O’Shea, so I’m Mrs. O’Shea. I do not remember how it started, but this class as they’re leaving and I sing my good day, I will sing good day because it rhymes with O’Shea. Good day Mrs O’Shea, it works really well.

Stephanie Leavell 

I love it.

Relationships are Important!

Debbie O’Shea 

This class has decided that I’m called other things, and they just say it to me sneakily as they go, the Grade Ones or Twos, I can’t even remember. So they’re little. I’m Mrs. O’Donut or Mrs. O’Biscuit, but they’re usually something sweet and they just think it’s so funny. It’s like, deepened our relationship and it’s just so silly, but it’s fun and I think let’s get it back to music, but that is what forms relationships, isn’t it?

Stephanie Leavell 

Yes, yes and all that little stuff is so important with kids and in music therapy, that’s what we say. Like the first step is forming a trusting relationship, right? And that way you can build all of this, these other concepts and these other things on top of that.

Debbie O’Shea 

Yes, you can’t do anything with them unless you have formed that relationship in the first place. And think of all of that time that you spent focusing more on improvisational aspects of your work, that would have also built a huge bank of ideas that are sitting in the back of your mind that must help to inform your composition.

Stephanie Leavell 

It absolutely does. Yeah, and it was funny when I started writing more, writing songs. And the reason that I did that is because my family moved across the United States and my husband was going to do a PhD program. I ended up as a preschool music teacher, and I had like three pre existing songs, it’s all I had. I remember the first day I showed up and I Googled a couple more songs and so maybe I had like six songs or whatever, and then in my head, I’m just like, oh, I’ll Just improvise the rest, right? But working one on one is really different than working with, you know, 25 three and four year olds. Where, you know, in my first preschool class, I remember looking up and it was a 25 or 30 minute class, something like that.

And I remember very specifically looking up and being 100% out of ideas 8 minutes in, like out. I had none, no ideas. So that was the day I went home and I started Googling songs and everything. And then I started going, some of these songs are in my own personal music style. So I started, every week writing a song or two and bringing them and trying them out, but it was difficult for me to actually write a song being improvisational, because what I like to do is react and respond in the moment.

And so a lot of my songs, people will notice their themes. And then in real life, what I do is I take that theme of a song and I sing that theme of a song, and then whatever I do in the middle is improvised, we’re gonna do different kinds of movements or scarves or whatever. And then I kind of go back to the theme to anchor us back in, and then I go back to an improvised B section. But even to this day, I don’t love doing concerts, I love doing small groups so that we can do that improvisational factor in there.

Debbie O’Shea 

Yeah that’s amazing. I find that it’s easy to use your songs and then to improvise beyond them. You’ve written them so that we can do that?

Stephanie Leavell 

Yes.

Debbie O’Shea 

As educators, that’s great. So what do you do to record and house? How do you get your music out there?

Stephanie Leavell 

One of the best things I ever decided to do is when I started Music for Kiddos, I started something called the Song of the Month Club and it’s my email list and all it is is that I send out a brand new recorded song for free once a month to my email list. I did that for my own accountability, because I wanted to have to write and record regularly. And sure enough, almost every month, that day comes on, I’m like, I gotta record something, because life gets so busy, but it keeps me recording so just today I went into the studio and had a three hour recording session.

And I do that every six weeks or so, and then that keeps my Song of the Month going. I used to do it at home, just on my equipment, but now I do it in a studio and have some additional help there, which is really, really nice. I’m trying to get more quality recordings than what I could get at home.

Debbie O’Shea 

That’s fabulous. So you do that every six weeks or so? Do you go in there, ready ish, or I think I’ll do x, y, z, but you let things happen a little if they improvise in a different way?

Stephanie Leavell 

Yeah, when I’m recording, I am ready, and I have it rehearsed and practiced, and I know exactly what BPM it’s going to be. Because when you sit down and you go to record they say Okay, where should we set the click track? And you’re like, all of a sudden there, and it’s a little nerve wracking. You’ve got a couple, a few takes. I mean, you can do as many takes as you want, but I lose steam after a few takes. So I try really hard to come very well rehearsed.

So for example, today I finished up some harmonies on a song that I did last time. I did a lead vocal for a guitar track I did last time. So I did some vocals that kind of finished up some stuff we were working on last time. And then I brought three new songs where I did guitar tracks, and we got the guitar tracks all done, and then I worked on the lead vocals. And next time I’m bringing a percussionist with me.

Debbie O’Shea 

Oh, nice. So actually, that’s one of the nerdy questions I actually had was, do you do your own backing vocal and harmony?

Stephanie Leavell 

Yes.

Debbie O’Shea 

Because I listened to them and go, Is that Stephanie, or is there someone else whose voice just blends really well? Okay.

Stephanie Leavell 

That’s me, and I love doing it. My other dream job is like a background vocalist for an amazing singer or something. I would love to do that. Yeah, I love, I love, love, love harmony.

Debbie O’Shea 

Oh, well, your dreams come true because you are a backing vocalist for an amazing singer.

Stephanie Leavell 

Oh, gosh, thank you.

Debbie O’Shea 

It blends so beautifully. Yes, it’s just a pleasure to listen to. So what we’ll do is, I’ve added in my notes here we’ll put in the link for people to join your Song of the Month Club.

Stephanie Leavell 

Oh, thank you. Great.

Debbie O’Shea 

So we can add that.

Sign-Off

Thank you for joining me for this podcast. Don’t forget, you’ll find the show notes and transcript and all sorts of information on crescendo.com.au. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast or found it valuable, you might like to rate it on your podcast player and leave a review. I’d really appreciate it if you did. All I can be as the best version of me. All you can do is be the best you. Until next time, bye.

Just for Laughs

As we know, laughter relieves stress, don’t lose sight of the funny side of life.
My husband told me that I should do lunges to stay in shape. I think that would be a big step forward!

Links Mentioned in the Episode:

📜 Music as a Tool for Childhood Success with Stephanie Leavell | 110

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