KU Giving Magazine
Music To Your Ears
Michelle Strickland
From the Hill to the Bob Dylan Center, KU Music student Taylor Zickefoose’s fellowship is a songwriter’s dream come true.
Taylor Zickefoose is no ordinary songwriter.
Zickefoose, a graduate student working toward a master’s degree in music composition in the University of Kansas School of Music, studied with Composition Professor Forrest Pierce, who said the music she creates “just makes your brain sparkle as you’re listening.”
That musical glitter put Zickefoose in a small, prestigious club: She is one of two people chosen from a worldwide pool of applicants for the Bob Dylan Center Songwriter 2024 Fellowship program, based at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The fellowship, a partnership between the Dylan Center and Universal Music Publishing Group, was created to mentor and develop aspiring songwriters.
Zickefoose, of Edmonds, Wash., has been interested in writing music and songs since high school. For her, the fellowship is a dream come true. “I’ve studied composition in college, but I feel like I truly chose songwriting 100% when I began studying with Dr. Pierce at KU,” Zickefoose said.
Pierce had high praise for Zickefoose’s talent both as a songwriter and as a performer.
“She has an extraordinarily creative personality overflowing with inspiration and inventiveness,” he said. “She’s a singer of great ability and someone who is extremely knowledgeable about all sorts of genres of singing.”
She also is an inventive lyricist who can communicate well with listeners, he said.
“One of the things that I always appreciated in our lessons together was to see the types of wordplay and alliteration and sophisticated expansion and modification she created,” Pierce said. “There’s also a powerful, soulful humanness about the subject matter that she writes about.”
As part of the fellowship, Zickefoose must write and record demos for five new original songs each month. She’s currently preparing for the fellowship’s first official concert.
“It’s forcing me to be creative with the boundaries I give myself while also having the freedom to experiment in any way I feel moved to,” she said.
Zickefoose keeps her phone close by to record musical ideas on the fly. She likes to listen to them later as a starting point for some writing sessions.
Along with her phone, she also carries a spiral notebook with blank paper and colored ink pens. She favors notebooks from Denik with designs from artist Felicia Chaio.
“I always carry a notebook to write down any lyrics, ideas or doodles that come to mind,” she said. “A good, smooth-feeling pen makes all the difference. I choose whatever color feels right in the moment.”
Zickefoose inside the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla. She is one of two 2024 Bob Dylan Center Songwriter Fellowship winners.
Zickefoose plays piano and ukelele but considers her voice her main instrument. Her background is in vocal jazz singing, and her influences include Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae. Her compositional influences are jazz standards writers such as Cole Porter, Fats Waller and Antônio Carlos Jobim. But her musical interests are far from limited.
“I really like complex music that stretches the boundaries of genres,” she said. “There are so many artists I admire who write very different music than I do. Hiatus Kaiyote, Everything Everything and Sylvan Esso incorporate electronic elements I haven’t experimented with yet.”
Zickefoose is away from KU and Lawrence for the yearlong fellowship, but while she was on campus she taught second-year theory in the previous academic year to sophomore and junior music students. It was that graduate teaching assistantship that made attending KU possible, and being the educator rather than the student is an experience she doesn’t take for granted.
“I feel like when you teach, you have to quickly overcome your fear of being wrong, and you have to know the topic well enough to explain it,” she said.
The quality of the faculty drew her to KU’s School of Music, and Zickefoose has enjoyed studying with Pierce as well as Ingrid Stölzel, associate professor of composition.
“They are brilliant composers, but also wonderful people and educators,” she said. “I wouldn’t be in this fellowship without their support and encouragement.”
Pierce reflected on his weekly sessions with Zickefoose, which he likened to album release parties.
“It was always just a surprise,” he said. “She would show up with a release-ready pop song and I would get to sit there in the lesson and listen to this amazing performer deliver the world premiere every week, and that was a real joy.”
Colin Roust, associate dean of academic affairs in the School of Music, noticed Zickefoose’s willingness to collaborate. She helped organize a songwriting collective, a group of students who met on their own every week to perform and critique new songs they had written.
“It’s a fantastic model that pushed these students even beyond the requirements of the curriculum and made them all better songwriters,” Roust said.
Among Zickefoose’s goals are writing and performing her own songs as well as collaborating with and writing for other artists. She will be releasing her own music soon on streaming platforms.
“Expect to hear melodies that beg you to sing along, and lyrics that ask you to pause and think,” she said. “Songs have a unique ability to calm the anxiousness in my soul. This power drives me to share my music, hoping to find at least one person whose world might be changed by listening.”
Roust said the school was thrilled to see Zickefoose receive this fellowship.
“It’s incredibly exciting for us to see Taylor’s name linked with a Nobel Prize-winning artist who’s considered by many to be the greatest songwriter who ever lived,” he said. “With the launch of our new bachelor of arts in music production and technology this fall, we hope to see more student songwriters come to KU to hone their craft and, hopefully, to enjoy the kinds of successes that Taylor has achieved.”
