Jo Evans writes folk songs about important times, places and people in her life. She is an accomplished singer from years of choir singing and has actively taken up songwriting quite recently. Jo talked about some of the important influences and mentors which have encouraged her to write songs including a songwriting workshop she attended recently - The Big Sing in The Desert - https://bigsingcommunity.com/events/big-sing-in-the-desert/#:~:text=A%20unique%20four%2Dday%20singing,%2C%20art%2C%20conversation%20and%20community. The workshop encouraged Jo to map out concepts and build songs in more of a structured way than she'd done previously which she has found really helpful.

She also has a group of musical friends and colleagues that she draws heavily on for advice and feedback which has helped her enormously.

Jo recollects the time she realised that writing songs was a way to provide an outlet for and communicate about issues that are very important to her. This realisation and the support from her musical community has given her confidence to keep on writing, and more recently, performing original songs!

We discussed Jo's song "Night Visitor", a very personal song about the unexpected loss of a close friend of hers many years ago. The loss of Jo's friend was a very difficult experience and writing the song all these years later has been an important way for Jo to process what happened. She played the song live in the studio and what a beautiful song it is!

We also discussed how Jo built the structure of Night Visitor from a couple of musical ideas which led to the song emerging within an hour! Other songs take Jo much longer to write and need many iterations over months before she's happy. She is very encouraging of others to give songwriting a go!