Earlier this year, Ukraine group Go_A won the national final Vidbir with their self-written song “Solovey”. But for their Eurovision 2021 return, it seems that they’re bringing out the big guns. Go_A have revealed that they’ve recently been involved with an online songwriting camp with top Eurovision songwriters.
The band talked about their songwriting camp experience on the Selection show on Ukraine radio station Radio Promin.
Group member Taras Shevchenko revealed that the online songwriting camp was held in July and was focused on coming up with ideas for Go_A’s Rotterdam entry.
Shevchenko said that the camp was organised by the music professionals collective Unified Songs. He noted that songwriters from Unified had been behind hits by hit artists such as Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande, as well as Gjon’s Tears Eurovision 2020 entry “Répondez-moi”. Shevchenko said, “we immediately decided that we want to have experience working with such people.”
Shevchenko also talked about the songwriting process. Go_A worked with Polish producer Mikołaj Trybulec and British songwriters Ryan Lawrie and Ashley Hicklin. The latter has previously co-written Tom Dice’s Eurovision 2010 song “Me and My Guitar”, Axel Hirsoux’s 2014 song “Mother”, Jurijus Veklenko’s 2019 song “Run with the Lions” and Blas Cantó’s intended 2020 entry “Universo”.
The songwriters and Go_A created one song every day of the camp. Shevchenko stressed that they haven’t ended up with complete tracks ready to be released, but rather “we wrote the main melody, the lyrics, the structure, we worked very productively and met wonderful and cool people.”
While the group’s 2020 song “Solovey” was written entirely with Ukraine lyrics, some English-language songs were produced from the songwriting camp sessions. But the article suggests that the group again is more likely to use ideas from these songs, rather than the entire songs themselves.
Shevchenko also said, “I think the experience of working with other musicians is always interesting, and here we wrote with world-class professionals. Maybe one of the songs that we will present at your discretion to participate in Eurovision 2021 was born in this period.”
While Go_A has been confirmed as Ukraine’s act for Eurovision 2021, to date, no details have been given of how their song for Eurovision 2021 will be selected. As Go_A have been internally selected, the broadcaster will not hold it’s usual national final, Vidbir. However, it is possible that the broadcaster may hold a national final to select Go_A’s song for Rotterdam.
What do you think? Should Go_A sing in English this year? Should the band collaborate with others or write on their own? Tell us your thoughts below!
Go_A should continue singing it Ukrainian. No need for Go_A to sing it in English.
Can anyone just enrol on one of these songwriting camps?
I think they have a great attitude about this process. Their musical style and sound is obviously very much tied to Ukraine, but that doesn’t mean they can’t learn some things from these successful international artists. The experience probably did not give them the song they will bring next year, but hopefully it has helped them learn how to make their music more accessible.
What I love about ‘Solovey’ is how unique and innately Ukrainian it is, as well as the subtle fierceness, and overall presentation by their dead-eyed pocket-rocket lead-singer, Kateryna Pavlenko. As Robyn suggested below, I like that they are viewing these new songs as skeletons, and will be able to use what they want, and then add their own Ukrainian flair to them. I don’t see the Ukrainian language as a barrier to their success at Eurovision (on the contrary actually), but I believe that the bigger issue for Go_A will be to deliver a song that isn’t as jarring for… Read more »
I definitely think it’s promising they take it so seriously and try a lot of stuff and started so early. If the English lyrics are really great and the lead singer has a decent pronunciation, I see no problem with English, but I think for this particular group, Ukrainian is probably the way to go. Just, please, do not take inspiration from the song ‘Mother’. Nobody should.
I love when artists are motivated like that and show their motivation.
Songs coming from songwriting camps don’t get always good results in esc, maybe because a song written by so many people at the same time is forcefully less personal and more global, more generic and can be for that less touching, less coming from the heart, more manufactured in some ways. It’s my opinion only cause sometimes songs created like that work very well in the esc, Bulgaria 2020 and sometimes not, Germany 2019.
I think it always fall on the type of song a singer, who has no input to its creation, gets to perform with. Many past winners, and well-placed entries of the contest have been songs that were handed out to their performers so the responsibility is on their shoulders to provide viewers and jurors a believable performance that would be convincing enough to be rewarded with points.
Yeah in this case the singer have to appropriate himself the song and the universe around the song which is not impossible or a bad thing but for me I think it can create something not natural.
Bulgaria 2020 ? How did you know the final result, the contest was cancelled. And Germany 2019 was a pure joke entry. But the main problem with songwritting camp is that many of this songs are in english language and unfortunatly so far away of the diversity of the contest.
Of course I don’t know the final result of Bulgaria, but I wanted to use recent examples to illustrate my comment. I’m not a soothsayer but I’m pretty sure Bulgaria would have got a better result than Sisters!. I agree the most of the songwriting camps songs are in english. I’ m not against a little touch of english in a song, bilingual songs don’t disturb me, but when a non english speaker country use a song completely in english I don’t like that, they don’t show that they are proud of their identity and of their language doing that.… Read more »
Yeah it seems not to be a pure songwriting camp, as we have already seen, without the artists involved in the process and to find the absolute best song for them, for me it doesn’t work, but in the case of Go_A it was just to be inspired and to see how work some international songwriters, which is not at all a bad thing.