Manitoba Music‘s Challenge took place over five days (June 9-14) at idyllic lake-side cabins at Falcon Trails Resort, Falcon Lake, Manitoba. This year was programmed differently with the focus being on understanding songwriting more as a career and less as a means to being an artist. We wanted to create a space to truly learn new skills, new ways of thinking about songwriting as a whole, and for the writers to broaden their creative scope in a way that will help them create a sustainable career. With this in mind, we flew in our two mentors, Heather Longstaffe and Josiah Rosen who are full-time career-writers based in Los Angeles. Beyond their one-on-one sessions with the artists, Heather and Josiah spent mealtime workshops discussing the different projects, goals, and artists that career writers are expected to write for in the writing room.

Each day, the artists were given a writing challenge, then put into writing groups which were selected based on their one-on-one meetings at the beginning of the week. At the end of each day, after dinner, the whole group would get together to hear the songs that had been written and recorded that day which was a very exciting addition to our programming.