What are 'Songwriting Camps'

Each day, typically for a whole week, different combinations of writers/artists are put into a room and given one day to write/produce and record a song. Under pressure and with time limitations you need to form a connection and open up immediately - this is essential if you're going to create something meaningful.

A lot of modern records are created this way, and in May 2014 I took part in one myself for Australian Performing Rights Organisation APRA in London.

Troye Sivan

The first three days of the writing camp had gone really well and although I'd had a distinct lack of any sleep (staying up all night finishing the tracks) a few of us had gone for a drink that evening to meet the other artists who we'd be writing with the next day. I met Troye and he later sent me an unreleased demo of his song Happy Little Pill.

At the start of the day you typically have no idea what you'll write, however that day Troye shared a couple lyric ideas and I very quickly found some piano chords that helped him start channelling something I think he'd been wanting to write about. We finished our track Gasoline really quickly that day. You can hear that days demo on his Soundcloud.

Nurturing Talent

After he'd left I checked out some of his videos and saw the amazing fan base he'd been creating himself. Here was a YouTube star with millions of subscribers - a legit celebrity among his fans already but also one of the most down to earth people I'd met.

His last original song (inspired by The Fault in Our Stars) had received 100,000 notes on Tumblr overnight and from this he'd signed a record deal with EMI. His record label were nurturing his talent in exactly the right way - they kept the young producers SLUMS that Troye had been working with and even today he still works closely with Alex Hope and is allowed to make the music he wants.

TRXYE

EP release

Troye announced the new EP later that month onstage at VidCon in front of thousands of people and immediately the news about the upcoming release was trending on Twitter. I could see that people were really excited for it and in turn I was excited to see how the record would do! As soon as the preorder went live things started to go ballistic.

The record came out officially on August 15th and the momentum kept building.. reaching number 1 in the UK on iTunes and eventually going on to top the iTunes charts in 66 countries!

This was a really exciting and crazy couple of weeks and I'm not sure if anyone really thought or dreamed the album would connect the way it did all over the world.