When musician Noah Plotkin returned to his native Chicago after living both abroad and in New York, he sought opportunities to workshop his songs. But all he found were open mics in bars. Audiences weren’t necessarily listening, and the performers weren’t necessarily playing original work.

Then Plotkin met Ryan Joseph Anderson, a fellow songwriter, who invited him to FitzGerald’s to participate in a Tuesday night songwriter circle. Immediately, Plotkin found the Berwyn club offered the environment he was seeking. Today he hosts his own monthly songwriter night at Madame ZuZu’s Tea Shop in Highland Park, which is co-owned by Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan and Chloe Mendel.

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“This is more about creating community and a place people can experience something they haven’t experienced before,” he said.

Chicago has always been rich in songwriters. In the 1970s, a folk music boom produced dozens of them, most notably John Prine, Steve Goodman, Bonnie Koloc, Michael P. Smith and many others, due to the proliferation of North Side clubs catering strictly to singer-songwriters. The city’s moment as a songwriting epicenter appears to have returned. In recent years, venues from Hammond to Highland Park, Berwyn to Aurora, have presented special curated listening nights for both established and emerging songwriters to present new work in collaborative settings.

These kinds of shows are typical in cities like Los Angeles and Nashville, where performers vie to be seen by record labels and music publishers use them to scout new talent. In Chicago, the showcases are about something much simpler: the craft of writing a good song.

The nights have flourished since the COVID-19 pandemic, when clubs were shuttered for more than a year, leaving songwriters and audiences adrift. 

“People are very thirsty to present their music” today, Plotkin said. “Whether it got sidelined or rescheduled, there are now way more songwriters out there in Chicago than there are venues and stages that can host them.”

Songwriter Gerald Dowd, who hosts a monthly songwriter night at FitzGerald’s, said the proliferation is also “a little bit of a pushback against all the cover bands and album nights” that emerged since clubs reopened as an effort to get people back through the doors. “Trying to drum up support for original music” was his mission, he said. “People were feeling like there has to be an outlet for new songs to get heard.”

At Dowd’s “Song of the Month Club,” which is in its third year, he and a special guest from either Chicago’s songwriting world or a touring songwriter, each present a new song written exclusively for the show, as well as present recent personal work. The deadline is naturally helpful in getting new songs out, but the show also forces songwriters to push themselves artistically.

“On one hand it’s easy to write a song. But if you want to make something meaningful and with heft, it can be incredibly draining. The challenge of knowing I have to meet these incredible songwriters where they are because I know they’ll bring something great — it pushes me along to do better,” Dowd said.

Jenny Bienemann spent years creating showcases with the sole purpose of instigating creativity among Chicago songwriters. At FitzGerald’s and other spaces around the city, her shows are curated to bring together Chicago’s “unsung heroes of music” and encourage them to take creative risks. “Haiku Milieu,” one of her longest running shows, features a rotating slate of new songs inspired by one of her published haiku poems, backed by a full band. “It’s about how one piece of art can inspire another piece of art,” she said.

The show’s latest installment — May 10 at the Venue in Aurora — will feature 20 working songwriters from the Chicago area, a testament to the prodigious scene that has emerged in recent years. “Chicago is the unsung central hub of songwriting, 100%. There are so many great people writing songs here. You could be in line at the grocery store and standing next to the person who broke your heart or lifted you up on stage the night before,” she said.

The growing number of songwriters in Chicago has given way to showcases in alternate spaces outside traditional music rooms. Every month or even week, audiences can listen to songwriters workshopping new work at, among other places: Paul Henry’s, an art gallery in downtown Hammond; the City News Cafe, a magazine shop in Portage Park; Jarvis Square Pottery, an art studio in Rogers Park; or Kopi Cafe, a restaurant in Andersonville co-owned by songwriter Al Rose. The close quarters of these spaces make them perfect for listening audiences, Rose said.

“People want to connect, they want that warm and intimacy, and these alternative venues are coming up out of that necessity. They’re not there to replace the clubs, but they help fill a void,” he said.

For songwriters, these nights, no matter where they are, are fulfilling a primal need to share new work, Rose said. “Songwriting for most people is a pretty solitary affair. You’re working alone and you finish the song and once you finish a song, the life of a song exists two ways: You can record it or you can perform it live,” he said. “There’s certain thing about the airing of a song. You want people to hear it. It’s the essence of what we all want to do.”

Building a community that continues that tradition is important, Bienemann said. Her efforts “exist to counteract” society’s tendency to downplay the value of creating original work. “Artists are creating because they want to connect,” she said. “We spent a lifetime cultivating these skills so we can express life and bring it to other people who can benefit from it.”

Mark Guarino is a journalist based in Chicago and the author of Country & Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival.