Have you ever wanted to talk about songwriting with an expert and even an international star in the music business? On Friday, April 10, you will have that chance at a special Songwriters Discussion and Performance with J. Trafford and Matt Pless.
The discussion portion of the event will be at Viva Books at 326 N. Charles St. at 7 p.m., and the performance portion will take place next door at Stem & Vine.
Trafford is a Pittsburgh native, and a musician and songwriter of more than 20 years. “Why is My Heart in My Throat?” is a hardcover collection of his lyrics, published in September 2025. To support the book’s publication, Trafford began a Songwriters Roundtable Discussion tour. In each city he visited, he engaged an indie musician from that city on the “nitty-gritty specifics of their songwriting technique and artistic lives,” Trafford wrote in an email. In March 2026 he released an expanded paperback version, and Trafford has planned more discussions with local musicians.
Pless is that musician from Baltimore, and has a touring schedule heavy enough to make appearances and performances in his hometown rare. He has toured extensively in Europe and across the United States, and shared the stage with Maroon 5, Rilo Kiley, Alkaline Trio, Arlo Guthrie, Bad Brains, Fallout Boy, All Time Low and others. In 2012, Baltimore Fishbowl reported Pless was the only Baltimorean to be featured on the “Occupy This Album,” the CD produced to benefit the Occupy movement.
Trafford spoke to Baltimore Fishbowl about the motivation, logistics, and rewards of putting together a combined workshop-and-performance tour.
“I’ve been a professional musician for a little over 20 years now, and it’s something that’s been on the back of my list of things to do, to publish a lyric book, for probably close to 10 years,” Trafford told Baltimore Fishbowl in a phone call, “and it just finally worked out that I had the opportunity to do it in the fall of last year.”
When the hardcover lyrics book came out, he planned a promotional tour in which he engaged songwriters who were active in that town or city for roundtable discussions about songwriting from the perspective of people who had years of experience doing that work.
“The more specific things, rather than just ‘Who’s your inspiration?’, really getting into things like word choice and balancing abstraction versus directness; really mostly focused on lyrics, but speaking a little bit about music composition as well,” Trafford said.
Trafford described each event as fascinating and revealing for him regardless of how well-attended, because people–especially songwriters–continued to reach out to him to ask him to do more of these discussions. When the expanded version of “Why is My Heart in My Throat?” came out, he decided to do more roundtable discussions with its publication. It happens to coincide with Pless having some time off in April.
Trafford’s partner, Candrika Rice, plays bass in his group, and has known Pless for a long time. She has toured with him and knows Pless’ catalog from front to back. Rice will co-moderate the roundtable. Another Pittsburgh performer, The Lady Grace, will also be on hand in Baltimore for the roundtable discussion and the performance next door.
In addition to touring as a professional musician and performer, putting together one’s own book tour adds layers of strain to one’s schedule. Trafford said he learned a lot, though, both in writing and compiling the book and in setting up the roundtable discussions around the country.
“Setting up the tour thing has really been a cold call sort of exercise where I’m looking for small independent bookstores or record stores or in some cases coffee shops to host these events,” Trafford said. “So yeah, I sort of just tried my luck and I reached out to Viva (the owner’s name is Viva) Books in Baltimore, there. And yeah, she seemed really interested.
“I mentioned that we also wanted to put together sort of a performance side of the event as well, and it just so happens that adjacent to Viva is a spot called Stem and Vine, and they were very open to the performance side of the event. So, we’re just gonna mosey on over directly from the discussion … and we’re gonna give a little intimate performance over there.”
Trafford said not every bookstore is set up for or interested in entertaining the idea of a musical performance, but it happened to work out that way with Viva having Stem & Vine right next door. The core of his pitch is not the performance, he noted; it is his book and the discussion of the nuts and bolts of lyric- and song-writing. That is what he wanted to bring wherever he could.
He is excited to be in Baltimore with Pless, saying his reputation precedes itself.
“He doesn’t get a chance to do this terribly often, that he appears in Baltimore,” Trafford said of Pless. “So yeah, I think he’s looking forward to it. He’s bringing out people who haven’t seen him locally in a while.”
In reflecting on the compilation process and revisiting his songs that span more than 20 years of work, Trafford said it has been a process of reexamining and recontextualizing. He had written the songs down, but not necessarily for other people to see.
“So it was a process of determining, does this stand up to reading, like casual reading?” Trafford said. “So, that was another part of the thought process that I don’t typically go through in my day-to-day musician life, just examining this as a written work.”
He looks back on the experience, though, and says he enjoyed it.
“I value the lyrical aspect of songs, … I think possibly more than some people around me,” he joked. “Publishing a book of my lyrics, like I said, was on my to do list. It was a thing that I really wanted to do…. It was, like I said, a learning experience… but yeah, I really enjoyed it.”
