Songwriting circles are a brilliant idea. Anything that's about people getting together, learning, improving, sharing and critiquing has to be a positive. I know this from past involvement in writers' groups, which serve a similar function - these are anything but a backslapping exercise, and if they were would be considerably less effective and useful.

I used to be scathing about singer songwriters because I understood 'singer songwriter' to be a genre of music that began and ended with James Taylor and his miserable ilk. Understanding now that it's also a broad description for every bugger that sings stuff they wrote themselves, how on earth is it possible to generalise about singer songwriters? The term covers an absolute multitude of sins, pleasures and all other points in between from the sublime to the ghastly.