Triad Musicians Launch Songwriting Challenge to Boost Regional Music Scene

Tyler Millard gave four Triad songwriters eight weeks, one prompt per week, and a slot at Greensboro's Flat Iron to perform whatever they produced. The Oak Ridge singer-songwriter and producer built the challenge around a deliberate premise: volume creates quality. "It's not quality versus quantity. It's quality by way of quantity," he said.

The mechanics are simple. Each week, Millard posts a prompt in a Facebook group, ranging from serious subjects to playful premises to more technically musical ideas. Participants respond by posting a recording of the original song they wrote, building a library of new material one track at a time.

The challenge ends in a live show at the Flat Iron at 221 Summit Avenue in downtown Greensboro, where each of the four songwriters or songwriter teams performs a set drawn from at least half the songs written during the eight-week period. "I love these writing groups where you write a song a week," Millard said. "At the end, there's a little bit of a highwire act where you perform half the material." Tickets are on sale now.

Among the four participants is Colin Cutler, a Greensboro singer-songwriter, folk musician, poet, and storyteller who performs with banjo and guitar. The weekly prompt creates a familiar kind of pressure. "There's always a moment you look at the prompt like … 'I got nothing,'" one participant said. "Over time, you learn how to push past that feeling."

Millard has also tied each show to a local cause, with part of the proceeds from the performance going to a charitable partner.

The Flat Iron holds up to 200 people in an acoustically treated space at the center of downtown Greensboro. The venue has been working to address what Greensboro's 2024 Music Census identified as a shortage of artist development opportunities in the city, running a monthly showcase that pairs local emerging acts with nationally recognized headliners. Millard's challenge extends that mission on a grassroots level: the Facebook group is free to join, the prompts go out weekly, and the culminating Flat Iron show is the public payoff. Organizers see the model as repeatable, with future rounds potentially incorporating recordings of the completed songs or formal partnerships with regional festivals.