Silently Louder: The music of nonspeaking lyricists comes to Tucson

What does it mean to live in an autistic body, to inhabit an autistic mind?

This is one among many questions that emerge from the work of Brian Laidlaw, a poet and folk musician who mentors nonspeaking neurodivergent writers. 

“For me, as a neurotypical person, that’s like trying to see around a 90-degree corner,” said Laidlaw, who, on Nov. 15, will return to the UA poetry center to perform a collection of songs written by nonspeaking lyricists. 

“Part of the magic of these collaborations is that their songwriting instincts are often quite different from mine, and the things that they think to write songs about are totally different from the things that a neurotypical songwriter might gravitate toward. So I really try to stay out of the way as much as possible.”

The event, titled Silently Louder, follows Laidlaw’s 2023 performance at the Poetry Center, and will feature a brand-new set of songs.

Laidlaw, a Bay Area native and Moab, Utah resident, wears hats including poet, professor and touring singer-songwriter, and has always sought out ways to “blend songwriting craft and poetry craft.” Also, an essayist, he publishes prolifically about his passions for rock climbing and mountaineering.

Around a decade ago, while living in Minneapolis, Laidlaw connected with poet Chris Martin, who was involved in academic tutoring for neurodivergent individuals. The two formed what would become a longtime friendship and collaboration, and founded Unrestricted Interest, a nonprofit that supports neurodivergent writers. 

Unrestricted Interest offers students one-on-one workshop sessions with an expert teaching ensemble and has published numerous chapbooks through its micropress Unrestricted Editions. Though working at first with both speakers and nonspeakers, Laidlaw and Martin before long transitioned almost exclusively to nonspeaking or unreliably speaking writers. According to Laidlaw, there’s an “extra special intensity” that characterizes the group’s relationship to language. 

“They just had such a love of language, and such a sense of language’s power and importance, that they turned out to be really natural poets and lyricists,” Laidlaw said. “They are an incredibly inspiring group to collaborate with.”

Laidlaw’s sessions with his students, for the most part, take place over zoom. Some of the poets and songwriters communicate through laminated alphabet letter boards, others via keyboards. Laidlaw acts as a mentor, offering suggestions, suggesting prompts, providing feedback and asking questions. Meetings often result in philosophical conversations about the functions and intentions of poems, and how they might “offer different experiences to the reader.” 

The creations, Laidlaw emphasizes, belong entirely to the students. He does none of the writing, and part of his mission in spotlighting these works is to dispel harmful myths; the greatest misunderstanding about non-speakers, according to the mentor, is that they inherently experience cognitive deficiencies.

“A lot of the time, when people encounter someone who’s nonspeaking, they assume that they’re not intelligent or that they’re not following the conversation, or that they’re not capable of producing language,” Laidlaw said. “But, in fact, the case for the folks that I work with is that it’s a physical issue, not a cognitive issue. They struggle to coordinate all of the different muscle groups and fine motor commands that would produce the physical aspects of speech.”

“But their vocabularies are immense, they’re incredibly sensitive readers, they’re funny and insightful, and they have an astonishing command of language.”

Though teaching both poetry and song, Laidlaw has discovered over his careers in both that the two are largely divergent forms. Readers enjoy unpredictability in poems, surprising turns of phrase and unorthodox grammar, word choice, sentence structures and punctuation. Songs, on the other hand, are more rule-bound. Listeners value predictability. During Laidlaw’s songwriting sessions with students, the heart of constructing lyrics lies in rhyme and repetition, building in a “certain amount of sound patterning.” Because of its more structured nature, the musician finds that songwriting is a useful expressive mode for his autistic collaborators.  

“One of the senses that I get about what it is to be autistic is just to have an extremely sensory-rich life, an almost super-saturated, overwhelmingly dense sensory field,” Laidlaw said. “Not just with the present moment and its sounds and colors, but also many moments from the past kind of constantly being activated in the mind, with as much vividness as present day experience. So, there’s this sort of overwhelming richness of every moment, and that is beautiful and enlightening for a lot of these students, but I think it also makes it difficult to interface with neurotypical people, with neurotypical society.”

“But I think that songs end up having this kind of predictability and structure and repeating rules that make them a useful container for this kind of unbounded sensory experience. The form itself ends up being a real asset to help gather that sensory information, gather narrative, and then articulate it in a way that feels a little bit more manageable and contained.”

Once lyrics are written, the student gives Laidlaw musical direction, which might entail a genre, instructing the singer to put on a country-like drawl, or listing sound-alike artists, like Bruce Springsteen or Gregory Alan Isakov, as influences to follow. Others take an impressionistic tack, imparting more abstract, atmospheric inspirations like “autumn leaves rustling” or, one of Laidlaw’s own favorites, “a moose covered in frost.” 

Among the catalogue are songs of crushes, love and unrequited love, personal memories. Others take on friendship or nature. Some of the lyricists, who are invested in social and political advocacy for the disabled community, write about being disrespected, presumed incompetent, and sidelined by society. But a surprising number of songs, Laidlaw said, are goofy and slapstick and “take delight in the silliness of the world.”

“Which is refreshing, and in some ways maybe counterintuitive, because all of these folks have come through some pretty severe hardship to get to where they’re at,” Laidlaw said.

The set that Laidlaw will perform at the Poetry Center comprises the works of Arizona spellers, composed at songwriting retreats in Prescott. This program is the result of a partnership between Unrestricted Interest and Teva Community, an Arizona nonprofit that builds cohousing facilities for nonspeaking autistic people. Attendees can expect to hear a wide spectrum of songs, including ones about trees and snow and rain, gratitude for connections with friends and family, romance, jumping on a trampoline and the moon landing. 

“It was an amazing experience to get to be in the room and feel the energy of my fellow writers,” Laidlaw said.

In a perfect world, I would be totally transparent, and it would just be the students doing their own performing. So, I think, as much as possible, I just want to have the focus on them. They’re incredible people. They’re incredibly smart, funny, articulate, wise seers and thinkers, and it’s a pleasure to get to work with them and to get to shine the light back on them.”