Amazing. It’s almost April and I’m just now getting around to writing this wrap-up post. The reasons are valid, but unimportant. Notably, we didn’t have a post-February Zoom call, and I normally wait until after that so I can incorporate any feedback into my summary. I missed chatting with everyone about our voluntary shared trauma.
But here we are. The February highs and lows are rapidly fading. I’ve gotten some sleep and done some critical listening. Back in January, I was a bit worried that I was simply getting on a treadmill, exercising but not reaching for more. Perhaps that wasn’t the right metaphor.
Every composition, every act of creativity has the potential to open up a new path, even if it’s similar to a previous work. Each jam track makes me a slightly better player. Each ambient track is an opportunity to refine my sound design and emotional targets. Every lyric makes me a better lyricist, even if it wasn’t poetry. Writing something that didn’t work can be just as valuable as writing something that did.
Play stats for the month showed higher numbers in plays, listeners, and discrete tracks. It’s encouraging to see that people are listening to more than just the songs I’m doing during the month, and I hope they’re finding things that they like. As mentioned in one of my February posts, I’ll be creating some curated playlists and generally overhauling the Song-A-Day section of the site to make things a little easier to find.
Which Ruleset are We Playing?
I didn’t give myself any hard rules for the month, though I did have some general plans. As mentioned in my day one writeup for Destroy the Enemy, I had loosely decided to limit myself to singer/songwriter instrumentation: piano, bass, drums, and maybe some guitar. The intent was to focus on writing songs and not doing a lot of production work. This was never a hard rule, but I sometimes worry that I hide behind studio work to avoid songwriting.
But the studio work is a huge part of what I love to do and I’m not doing Song-A-Day for anyone but me. Mostly. There’s always the understanding that there’s now an audience. It might only be a handful of people, but this is the struggle I’ve had for nearly all of my creative life.
The lesson I’ve finally learned, though, is that if I’m not true to myself first and foremost, the art suffers. It was the weird stuff, the new age, the house music, the ambient — all of the things that came relatively easily and that I didn’t value because they came easily — those were the tracks that resonated the most with the people who listened, because they were authentic. They were true.
So when Destroy the Enemy turned into one of my better rock songs, I was ok with that. And the next day when a friend gave me a writing prompt and D-13 came out, I was ok with that as well. And the day after when Get Out of the Way presented itself, I just settled into the groove and let it run.
Some Cherry-Picked Metrics
I ended up writing nine songs with lyrics, ten if you count Mind Your Own.1Which I do, but only grudgingly This isn’t as many as I was planning and doesn’t reach my 2019 high water mark of 15, but it’s certainly a reasonable number.
While it wasn’t an intentional choice, I also ended up echoing one of my 2018 constraints: don’t do the same genre two days in a row. Fellow participant Jonathan Aronson noticed this right off, awarding me the “Lifesavers Five Flavors of the Week Award” at the end of week 1.
In fact, this genre constraint was the only one that I actively considered each day, though I never fully committed to it. It was more of a creative prompt than a rule: “If I did that yesterday and couldn’t do it again today, what would I do?”
An interesting development this year is that after the several tracks, I felt I was having a pretty solid month. It’s normally hard to tell if something is truly break-out good in the moment — there have been many times where I had a “this is the best thing I’ve ever done” feeling, only to be almost embarrassed by it days later.
There weren’t many extreme highs and lows during the month, though. I was satisfied with nearly every track. Nothing was terrible. A few reached plus-good, and there were even a few doubleplus good moments in there, but I never reached the manic-depressive-bipolar swings that have plagued me in the past.
One major win for the month was working a day ahead. Writing in the late evening/early morning, sleeping, and then finalizing when I woke up gave both my ears and my brain the break and distance needed to hear things more objectively. I never felt like the clock was my enemy. This approach also gave me a bit of breathing room to pivot if I realized the track was coyote ugly in the morning.
There were even some moments of (gulp) confidence. I didn’t finish a couple of tracks before going to bed, Laska’s Dream being one example, because I knew that I’d gotten the kernel down and doing the rest would be relatively easy. This may not seem like much, but it’s actually a huge step forward for me.
And maybe that’s the real change this year. It wasn’t so much that I was getting on a treadmill for rote exercise, but rather that I was feeling confident both in my technical abilities and in knowing that the creativity process was something I had navigated before and could do again.
There was never a question in my mind that I would get all 28 tracks finished. There were days when I enjoyed spending some time with Mary in the evening, rather than stressing about not having started writing yet. I actually relaxed. Which is not to say I wasn’t burning the candle at all three ends, only that I wasn’t stressed about doing so. It was more about doing the work than being panicked about it all.
And that brings us to the end of another challenge. After not writing for a month, I’m actually somewhat energized to get back into the studio and do some work. As always, thank you for reading and listening! It means a lot.
Notes
- 1Which I do, but only grudgingly