Song-A-Day 2023

Mare Nectaris

As I’ve mentioned previously this month, I do worry about these ambient pieces being unenjoyable for others, but two comments on the Song-A-Day site made me feel a lot better about it.  I think my favorite track this year is Mare Imbrium. What could be more beautiful, more emotionally satisfying? I wish I had written that one. Derek Greenberg I think I’ve listened to “Mare Insularum” like five times in a row now. Wesley Thompson These are both people whose work I respect greatly, so getting feedback like this is one of the most valuable external things about Song-A-Day.1The main … Continue reading

Dirty Fingernails

One of the things I’ve used Song-A-Day for is to experiment with producing styles of music that I like but haven’t tried before. These are often things that I wouldn’t do on my own outside of the challenge, like a country song, but since I’m getting to check off another day, it provides that experiment with a purpose. Even if it sucks, it’s still my track for today. Dirty Fingernails is a dirty blues-oriented rock piece. And I may as well own up to this right now, it’s a pretty blatant rip of a song from the movie Twin Peaks: … Continue reading

Small (Esme D Cover)

Cover day. Many Song-A-Day folks really enjoy this day. I normally find it to be a huge source of stress, and am normally disappointed in my results. The stress comes from trying to sift through the hundreds of tracks that have been posted and choosing one. I wrote about all of this in far more detail the last two years, so if you’re interested in that or my criteria for what a good cover song comprises, check out my entries on this day for 2021 and 2022. This year, it was a song by Esme D that ticked all of … Continue reading

Mare Insularum

Ok, at this point, I’m increasingly sleep deprived. This isn’t entirely Song-A-Day’s fault, I’ve had to be up earlier than I typically am for various reasons. I’m also procrastinating the start of new tracks until almost midnight or later, then working on them in the morning. It’s not exactly the “working a day in advance” process I’d meant to do, but I still kind of like it. Taking that break to sleep allows me to hear what I did a few hours earlier with fresh ears. It’s amazing what you hear after some time away, both technically and compositionally. In … Continue reading

Hypnos

After posting Tori’s Reef, I looked back at the genres I’d been writing for the previous week: Classical, Chill, Deep Ambient, Big Beat, Synth Wave, Classical, Chill… I decided that it would be fun to do something a bit more dancey, but maybe not as adventurous as Mind Your Own. Since I’d gotten a lot of positive feedback on D-13, I decided to go back to house. The fracturing of genres into micro-genres is one of the things I’ve struggled with for a long time. Even as a DJ, it was difficult for me to decide when something was Deep … Continue reading