OK, so here’s the dirty little secret: Nobody ever taught Robin Lane, the woman who will be teaching the songwriting class at Whole Music, how to write a song. She hung out with people who were doing the songwriting thing during the laid-back flower-power days on the left coast and Lane just assimilated it. At least that’s how she remembers it. She had always wanted to write songs, and one day they just “started popping out of me,” she says. Just started popping out, you might ask? Um, just like that? Yeah, she knew a few chords and, then as now, had a strong sense of melody and, maybe the crucial thing, things were happening to her, emotional pain being steroids for artists. Whatever the case, she had tapped into something. Soon she was deep in the Los Angeles folk-rock scene, which led to a time when she began informal collaborations with the band Crazy Horse and Danny Whitten, who Lane cites as a critical force in her development as an artist — and which led to her formal debut: Singing on the Neil Young/Crazy Horse album “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.” This was the run-up to her move to Boston, where she met ex-Modern Lovers players Asa Brebner and Leroy Radcliffe, resulting in Robin Lane & The Chartbusters, where the hippie-chick vibe became infused with a garage-y, new wave sensibility, and at the dawn of the MTV era. The band released three albums to critical acclaim — and had one of the first videos on MTV, "When Things Go Wrong."
