This feature is a part of Ocean State Sessions.
Playing acoustic folk music can be a solitary endeavor, so Polly Bessette has set out to find new collaborators. It’s a late Wednesday evening in the spring. Polly is sitting in a classroom at the Brown Arts Institute, greeting her friends as they walk in. Some come with stories from their performance over the weekend, and others arrive excited to see what new skill they’ll be introduced to in today’s class. It’s a songwriting workshop that Polly Bessette has been attending for just over a month. “It’s just kind of a good experience to sit and listen and just see everybody else’s creative process. And every single person is different,” she tells us.
A classmate comes to the front of the room with his acoustic guitar and microphone and performs one of his latest songs. After performing the song a couple of times, he asks his peers for feedback. “If a friend were to say one thing about my song that was constructive criticism or something, I wouldn’t take it hard. I know they respect me as a musician,” Polly explains. “I think that a lot of times people don’t tell you what they think of your music. I think when you go out and you just play, people will think something, some type of way, and they’ll tell everyone else except you what they think about your music. So sometimes it’s nice to make friends who can be honest.”
Polly often tells stories through her songs, some more personal than others. Being vulnerable in front of a crowd is something Bessette has been used to since a young age. “I kind of got over the stage fright of being personal in front of people a long time ago,” she recalls. “In college, I had to write a lot of personal poems and read them in front of a whole group of people. They’re not musicians, they’re not your friends, they’re just taking apart your poem and saying this is terrible.”
Polly Bessette has a music video for her song “Sane Baby,” one of her more personal songs. The chorus of the song calls out, “I am alone/I know that already/The only sane baby/In decades of family.“ A dark, but catchy hook. “I felt like I was getting out almost, like, a suppressed feeling that I had for a really long time,” Polly explains. “Sometimes you ebb and flow with inspiration for writing. But that song, I just sat down and I wrote it in one day. I was like, ‘I can’t even believe I even wrote that because I don’t know where it came from.’ It formed from a deeper feeling inside of me that I feel like I hadn’t located previously and I hadn’t really touched upon.”
Polly’s turn to share her music with her peers at the Brown Arts Institute will come soon. As valuable as the criticism will be, there is another layer that is equally valuable: community. “A lot of people are in each other’s bands and they kind of will play backup for other people,” Polly tells us. As fun and useful as it is to learn a new skill, in the end, music is all about connection. “I think if you just go out into the world, you meet people if you’re open to it and you’re open to a conversation.”
