Challenges, Rules, and Elephants

During the wrap-up gathering for 2017, I was challenged by Derek Greenberg to try writing music in 2018 that I wasn’t comfortable doing or had never tried. Rap. Country. Whatever. I took up this challenge and added a few additional rules and guidelines for myself:

• Never write the same style two days in a row.
• Use every piece of gear in the studio over the course of the month.
• Focus on songs. Instrumentals only if inspired or absolutely necessary.
• Play more guitar.

I feel like I was largely successful with this. The variety is definitely there. In 2016, I had several ideas floating in my head and didn’t start grasping until about the third week. In 2017, it was roughly the same; I didn’t have specific song ideas, but I had general styles I wanted to explore. In 2018, I ran out of ideas and hit “weird” on the third day.

There are a few complete embarrassments, but I’m putting them here because that’s the spirit of the challenge, and the spirit of Song-A-Day in general. There was an elephant in the studio, however.

The death of my grandmother was a somber ending to the previous Song-A-Day. That wouldn’t come close to the devastation I experienced with the loss of my youngest brother to cancer in December of 2017. I had only been back home about two weeks when Song-A-Day 2018 started. I both looked forward to, and feared, the songwriting process. I needed to process, but didn’t want to think about it. Everything was raw and nothing made sense.