Last month I did something a little crazy.
I committed myself to writing 14 songs during the month of February.
That’s 1 song every 2 days. That’s insane, right?
Well apparently there are a bunch of other crazy kooks out there, because this year well over 2,000 took part in February Album Writing Month (http://fawm.org/). Unfortunately, I didn’t crank out 14 songs, BUT I gave birth to 9 songs I have varying degrees of love for, (2 of them being co-writes with the fantastic Rebecca Jasso). If you aren’t crazy about reading my thoughts on this intense experience, skip ahead to the end to hear 8 of the 9 songs. I’d love to hear your thoughts+feedback… so feel free to comment below or shoot me an email!
Otherwise, here’s what I learned at the end of it all:
- I’m a slow songwriter and that’s OK.
I was a little bummed out by how others were cranking out songs like it was NOTHING. But then (for some inspiration) I watched a cool interview of Jesca Hoops, who talked about the process of writing her latest album. She said when she first started, she walked for 10 miles with her phone as a voice recorder to come up with ideas. After 10 miles she had nothing. Then, feeling a bit defeated, she went down to her music room, and a song just suddenly came to her in it’s entirety: words music and all. Lesson being, we all write differently, and the creation process is different for everyone.
- Virtual Co-writing is FUN and LIBERATING
To make FAWM a little more feasible I knew I had to do some co-writing. Rebecca and I were both committed to FAWM this year and have a mutual respect for each other’s work so we figured, why not?! So we decided to each give each other a lyric writing assignment.
The deal was, there is no music to write to, and you are just focusing on writing the lyrics based on what the other person is looking for. You hand off your completed lyrics, and the other person completes the song by adding the music (with no input from you). Rebecca asked me to write a simple catchy pop tune about the sun in the summer (or something like that). As I wrote the lyrics I couldn’t help but have a little melody in my head just to keep some sort of syllable and rhyming structure, and by the end of it, I thought the song was cheesy and annoying. But what Rebecca came back with was SO much better than what I had in mind. I was honestly in awe. Seeing my lyrics unfold in an unexpected way was pretty cool guys… We might just do it again! You can check out that song by clicking here, and in the below playlist you can hear the lyrics Rebecca wrote for me in the song “Mechanical Boy”.
- When I think my well is dry, it might just be a matter getting the rusty gears cranking again
OK thats a terrible mixed analogy but I think you get it. Sometimes (or a lot of the time) I’m overwhelmed with all the things life throws at me, making it inevitable that my creative/songwriting gears will get rusty from lack of use. That usually leads me to feeling that I don’t have anything in me to give or create… that I’ve run out of inspiration. Pushing myself to JUST WRITE not only led to 9 pretty cool, more-than-half-way-decent songs, but it also got my creative juices flowing once again. My little songwriting gears haven’t stopped yet, and I have several songs I’m still in the process of writing.
And let me tell you…
It feels good.
So that’s it! FAWM 2017 was a success in my book.
I didn’t totally lose my mind.
I got some great stuff out of it, and I’m super pumped to start playing some of these new tunes. As I play them for people, I’m sure fine tuning will happen. Maybe a couple of these will end up in the “do not play” file. Others will hopefully make it on my next album!
So if you read all this, I’m guessing you are curious to hear these tunes I wrote! Here is a little playlist I put together for you:
*NOTE* – These tracks were all recorded via my iPhone voice recorder, so they are just memos really.