The 2021 Weekly Songwriting Challenge

I’ve written music my entire adult life. In fact, I recently came across two cassette tapes of probably the first songs that I ever wrote — I must’ve been about 15 or 16. So, for the past 25 years, I’ve probably written hundreds of pieces of music, if not thousands, even including the few-year songwriting drought I went through after Alice was born where I didn’t really pick up my guitar. But even then, I wrote them a lullaby that I still sing to them every night.

The Voice Memos app on my iPhone is littered with bits of potential songs, recorded wherever I am — in the rehearsal space in the office at work, on a beach in Maine, on a subway platform, in the bathroom, even one of me mumbling a tune after waking from a long night battling a fever in a Stockholm hotel room. I know that all you fellow musicians have a Voice Memos app that is the exact same. Every computer I’ve ever had has had tens to hundreds of recordings laying around in some state of completion. I‘ve had dozens of CDs and harddrives with this stuff on it. Bits of scrap paper and notebooks full of lyrics or ideas. The list goes on.

The thing is: most of those are gone now. Some of these files probably still exist on the old CDRs I’ve dragged with me from place to place as I’ve moved around, but I doubt I’ll ever find a computer with a CD drive and even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to open those old project files. Those tunes are all likely gone. And most of these, hundreds of these, went unshared with anyone. They have been, in the strictest sense, by me and for me.

The thing is: I rarely ever “finish” any piece of music I write, and I usually only ever share finished pieces. In my most prolific and complete writing period (right around 2000), I was finishing things — or at least getting close. It was at that time that I wrote and recorded what I consider my only album (Fake Smiles) and an EP (…and it will be lovely) , recorded in my kitchen with one take and a computer mic.

All these years writing songs I think I just assumed a music career was just around the corner for me. But that wasn’t the path I was on. I was never really serious about it — I never even thought to pursue it — and writing always remained a hobby. I never had any reason to finish a song. Even with the songs I wrote and shared (like Fake Smiles), few people really ever listened to them. I played them out at bars and never got a huge response. And, like I said, that was OK with me because the songs weren’t for anyone else. I wrote them for me, and I enjoyed playing them. But I was also lucky in that I was pursuing a different career and so didn’t ever have to depend on someone finding a connection to my music.

Add to that, it is way to easy to edit yourself creatively. Many of my songs remain unfinished because I usually scrapped them at the time because they “sounded too stupid,” or they weren’t the sound I was going for. The song was good, but I didn’t like the mix. Or the drum track wasn’t right. Or it sounded too much like Band X or not enough like Artist Y. Or I needed more time with production. I wanted too long for too many years to be something else that I never really embraced that all these creations were me, it was my creative brain coming through, and, you know, I was prolifically writing music. I’m not a professional, I’ve never made money off my music (well, that’s not entirely true), but I’ve been prolific writer for 25 years. And it has always brought me a hell of a lot of release and enjoyment.

Anyhow, I was thinking about all this over the weekend and realized that this year, I’m going to embrace it. I’m going to stop editing myself and push myself to get closer to completing more songs. And further, I’m going to share these songs, with you, here. How can anyone hope to make an AI version of me once I’m dead if no one ever has heard the songs I’ve written, these little bits of music that are such a huge part of me?

So, I’ve come up with a challenge for myself. Think of it as a New Year’s resolution.

Dan’s 2021 Song Writing Challenge

1. A piece of music must be posted each Monday, every week of the year.
2. The piece of music need not be “complete,” but must stand on its own, i.e., it can’t be two bars of me fiddling on the guitar.
3. The piece of music must be of reasonable length. I’m setting a minimum of 2 minutes. I have waaaay too many short pieces of music floating around for this to be a challenge were I to just say I could post 20 seconds of an idea.

And with that, here’s a taste of what I’m aiming for. This doesn’t officially qualify for the 2021 challenge, since I wrote it on Xmas eve 2020, but it inspired this challenge (as has the 3–5 other songs I’ve started over the past two weeks!)

20201224–001

I wanted to write something in 7/8 time, so this tune started with the drum beat (the AI drummer in Garageband, killer feature). I was playing with my new Novation LaunchKey at the time, and had been listening to a ton of Future Islands, so the synth part just fell onto my hands. Both guitar parts came really quickly once the synth part was there, and voila, about 2 hours later, this is what I had. Sometimes songs just fall out like that, you don’t have to do much. I’ve been struggling for vocals, but I’ve currently enlisted help on that so I may share a more finished version later.