Gillian Cosgriff : 8 Songs in 8 Weeks
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Gillian Cosgriff : 8 Songs in 8 Weeks

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“I write one song a week, every week for eight weeks. Each song has to be finished by midnight on Sunday of that week and I have to provide photo evidence of the lyrics on social media – otherwise I’ll just lie and say I did it,” says Cosgriff.

 

When she performs 8 Songs In 8 Weeks at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, it will be her fourth time presenting her “crazy songwriting experiment”, having first hatched the idea back in 2013.

 

“For this volume of the project, I started writing in the last week of November so the eight weeks was up by the time I did the first season in Perth,” she says. “I’ll be playing those eight songs at MICF, but rest assured they won’t be getting polished up or edited beyond their original forms. Melbourne will be hearing them just as I wrote them,” she says.

 

Cosgriff – a singer, musician, comedian and actor – wrote the songs under all kinds of circumstances, from squeezing in one on her only spare weeknight in one week to using the time on the red-eye flight from Perth to Melbourne on another.

 

“I have the whole week but depending on what else I have on the amount of time differs,” she says.

 

She’s no stranger to songwriting, having graduated from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts and winning the 2013 Melbourne Fringe Best Cabaret Award plus a Green Room Award for Best Original Songs for her second show, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.

 

For 8 Songs In 8 Weeks, she’s taken an interactive approach to finding her inspiration for the songs.

 

“Generally I’ll have the seed of an idea and then I ask people for their thoughts or suggestions based on that – although sometimes it ends up being a completely different song,” she says. “A good example is week six of this project where I asked people for weird things their brains came up with while they’re trying to fall asleep. Things like, ‘Why do we have eyebrows? What do birds do when it rains?’ That became a song called Night Thoughts. The songs are about all kinds of things.”

 

She’s back at the Butterfly Club, her usual Melbourne haunt. “I love doing a show at The Butterfly Club,” says Cosgriff, who later this year will be appearing in Eddie Perfect’s new play, Vivid White.

 

“Every MICF they name their cocktails after the shows they have programmed and this year mine is called the ‘Gillian Just B’Cosgriff’. I assume it’s a vodka with Berocca, garnished with Pringles – my MICF dinner of champions.”

 

By Joanne Brookfield

 

Venue: The Butterfly Club

Dates: Wednesday March 29 – Sunday April 9

Duration: 60 minutes

Tickets: $25 – $32

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