Encore!

On August 1, 2019, many of our songwriters gathered on stage at Nashville’s War Memorial Auditorium to sing “I Am a Soldier,” a song written at one of the first SongwritingWith:Soldiers retreats. The song was one of 18 performed at a concert filmed...

A Note from a SW:S Songwriter

This is a picture taken at a recent SW:S retreat. I had just written with a father who carried so much pain. My job was to collaborate with him and get that pain down on paper so he could get it out of his body and be able to look at it from a distance. Something...

Community Support

“Just wanted to let you and the team know that one of the participants from the retreat, Jeff Dawson, was injured in combat about four weeks ago. He is currently at Walter Reed recovering and his wife Trish is by his side, along with other family members. He is...

Out of the Chair (Into the Spotlight)

“Before coming to the retreat, I had the date, the time and the way I was going to end my life,” Joshua Geartz told SW:S Co-Founder, Mary Judd in 2015. “Writing my song with Mary Gauthier gave me hope—something I had lost.” He had arrived a...

The Ripple Effect

Reaching the Unknown Listener At SongwritingWIth:Soldiers, we post nearly every song written at a retreat onto our website to make it easy for anyone to listen and share. Thanks to social media outlets, such as Facebook, we are able to hear from some of those...

Beyond Words

“He did not know such experiences could be put into words.”— Richard Erickson, Ch, Brig Gen, USAF, retired The son of a WWII Navy hero, Richard Erikson, a retired Air Force Brigadier General and Chaplain, has spent his life connecting with veterans. Early...