Win, Lose, or Draw?

February is over. It’s March 3 and the nagging feeling that I’m supposed to be in the studio working at any hint of free time is starting to dissipate. This also means that all of the things I put on hold for a month – yard work, tax prep, running ethernet, building that server – no longer have a valid procrastination excuse.

In general, I think I had a decent month. It was decidedly a month in two-parts, though. The first half was very nearly all songs. There were only four instrumental tracks, and the songs were largely energetic, if not outright upbeat and positive. That was a surprise given my mood going into the journey; I had expected a lot more introspection. I think a large part of it was using my Random Finds playlist¹Discussed in February but briefly: I have a shortcut on my phone that identifies music I’m hearing and adds it to an Apple Music playlist. Anytime I hear something (in a movie or show, a store, or even just when I have some streaming station on) that I think is fun, cool, interesting, or weird enough that I want to hear it again, I run this shortcut. The resulting playlist is an algorithm-breaking mish-mash of eclecticism. to get inspiration or production challenges. I wasn’t just picking the first thing that played, though. I normally shuffled through until I heard something that inspired me in some way.

I’m repeating myself from an earlier post, but I definitely gained understanding of the old adage that if you want to sound like your favorite artist, don’t listen to their music, listen to the music they listened to. While there are some things that are certainly similar in what I did compared to the track that I was using as a reference, it’s more of a “I can tell he was listening to…” thing than a “this sounds like…” thing.

Starting on the fifteenth, I became decidedly more dark and instrumental. I certainly don’t think they’re worse or less enjoyable, just coming from a radically different place. I was tired, worn down by the world and the incessant din of political screeching from all quarters. I only wrote four songs with lyrics in the last two weeks, and one of them was sung by a robot. I did sing on the two cover songs, though.

This all sounds like the back half was negative to me, but that’s not accurate. After the initial burst of energetic output, and a lack of significant feedback about most of them except from a couple of regular listeners, I think I re-embraced the idea that the entire point of this month is to write for myself. Whatever it is, just write it. I struggled more with getting started most days, but once something grabbed me, I was generally pleased with what I ended up with. It’s telling, though that there was only one “positive” track in the last two weeks, and that was a novelty song.

My personal assessment of the month is that the quality was pretty consistent, but the topics were vastly different.

Winners and Losers

Of course there are no winners and losers in this in terms of the overall point of the challenge. I wrote every day. Win. Period. That said, there are some obvious stand-outs and some things that I found to be very helpful, and a couple of less-than-stellar efforts and things that I learned weren’t so great.

Guidelines, Not Rules

I gave myself a couple of loose guidelines for the month. Simplify, write from other perspectives, etc., but none of them were hard mandates like I’ve done in past years. I continued my general trend of not writing the same style two days in a row, but that’s less an intentional thing and more of a natural state for me. I write whatever shows up that day. Having soft-constraints helped me narrow my focus without making me feel trapped. Winner.

Try For More Songs

One of my guidelines was to really try and write more songs with lyrics. Much of the benefit I’ve gotten from Song-A-Day over the last eleven (!) years is learning that “I can do it.” I have no doubt that if I can write and produce a large amount of material at speed. Songs²I’m defining a song as anything where I’ve written lyrics, normally with a melody, but not necessarily. The main thing is that there are lyrics that someone or something will be singing/saying over music. are still a mental hurdle of sorts, though I’m less scared of them now.

As it did with producing a lot of music, Song-A-Day has helped me relax about lyrics, especially my perfectionist desire to have my lyrics be poetry. Great songs aren’t necessarily poetry. In fact, many aren’t. Maybe most. It’s always wonderful when the lyrics are poetry and the entire thing is elevated, and maybe I was overly spoiled by early listening to Neil Peart’s lyrics. In any case, I decided that this month I would not let laziness or fear keep me from at least trying to write a song if I had even the least bit of an idea. They weren’t all great, but I did a lot better. I was one short of tying my 2019 record for number of songs, and I did write a couple extra that I ended up not recording. Winner.

Need for External Recognition

I don’t think anyone trying to write pop music or gain an audience is immune to this, but I am still overly needy when it comes to external recognition. I’ve certainly gotten better at writing music for myself and am still convinced that if I went for that 100%, I would eventually find the audience that likes it, but I continue to put too much value on other people liking what I do in February. Any other month for something I’m releasing commercially, fine, that’s a valid metric. But this is supposed to be more about the exercise. Loser.

Too Much Production

I struggle with this one. On the one hand, I had intended to dramatically simplify my approach this year, to the point of just doing piano and voice tracks with no additional production work. I obviously failed at this, but I also came to understand that a big part of what I get out of the month is the production practice. It’s the finished product I’m after and, in many cases, the production is the song.³The Face of Adversity, for example, would not be at all enjoyable if it was just me and a piano. It would be funny, but probably not enjoyable. Draw.

Use of AI

No, I didn’t use any generative AI in my music. I did use Synthesizer V to do the vocals on one track⁴Climbing Crow Hill and they try to market it as an AI tool, but it’s not. It’s just an advanced speech synthesis tool – the modern successor to MacTalk and Voder and all of the other attempts from the earlier days of computing, which I also used on a track.⁵Malfunctioning Lullaby

What I did use AI for was generating a few of the featured images for the blog. This was a huge productivity boost and convenience. In past years, I’ve spent more than an hour searching the web for an image that conveys what I’m trying to convey and is either public domain or has an appropriate use license. That’s way harder than it seems since I think my site would technically qualify as a commercial use.

This year, I told DALL-E or Grok exactly what I had in my head and they happily made appropriate images. The one that I struggled a bit with was for The Crossing, not because it wasn’t appropriate or what I asked for, but because it was so evocative that I thought it might be too influential on the interpretation of the piece. The full size one was gorgeous, though, so I include it here for your enjoyment.

I continue to be optimistic about how AI will eventually become something that lifts humanity, though we’re in for the some rough times as we go through this revolution, just as we did in past ones. My position remains that I don’t trust current AI to do things without supervision, but if you have domain knowledge of what you’re asking it to do so you can do your own sanity checks on the output, it’s amazing. Winner.

Studio Organization

My procrastination cost me a “nice” studio this year – it’s still a wreck, and I’ve been putting things off because I wanted to run ethernet first. I’ve definitely reached the point where I’m sick of the mess, though, so I’ll be working on the studio over the next few months. I only used hardware synths on two tracks, largely because of the difficulty of reaching them. That’s going to be a metric for next year.  My goal is to get to the point where I can take glamour shots of the room, but right now, it’s like a really bad storage closet.  Loser.

Deeper Use of Tools

I’m on a year-long moratorium on new software (and most hardware). I ended up using a few tools extensively and frequently, notably FabFilter, Valhalla, Gullfoss and u-He. For the last year or three, I’ve been using post tags to identify the gear being used on a track, but that’s only useful when it’s not used on every track. I think that moving forward, I’ll only be using tags for the things that are out of the ordinary. I also made use of knowledge I’ve gained from the MOTU webinars on DP, including time stretching audio, controller changes, etc. Each year, I become more of a proponent of learning fewer tools more comprehensively. The extra stuff is fun, but I do better work more quickly with the stuff I really dig in and learn. Winner.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Ducklings

I’m always hesitant to pick the tracks I think were good and bad, because I often change my mind after time and repeated listening. Things that were shiny sometimes dull, and things that seemed like failures become not just successes, but favorites. And weirdest of all, I normally don’t like anything I’ve done all that much right after I’ve done it – I suspect it’s because I didn’t achieve some version of the perfection I had in my head. Still, I have found it valuable to be able to look back from the future and see how I felt at the time. It helps me to not be quite so down on those future things because I now know I’m probably wrong about it.

I want to stress that these are just my feelings about these things at this exact moment. I see the value in the ones I think could be better, and the flaws in the ones I think are pretty good. The “Surprise Hits” column is there for those things that I thought weren’t that good, a bit left-field, or just something I wasn’t sure anyone would really get into, but that generated really positive reactions. In fact, Both The Face of Adversity and Malfunctioning Lullaby earned “My new favorite song you’ve ever done” awards from my brother, Eric, only the third and fourth times he’s ever said that, and the first time it’s happened in the same year.

Also, just because I didn’t list something up there doesn’t mean I like or dislike it. Climbing Crow Hill and Invisibles are solid. I guarantee that I’ll be listening to Stet, Segmentation Fault and Nimble Hearsay a lot over the next year. Also, with the possible exception of Can’t You Pay Attention to Alice?, I don’t think anything was “not good,” and even Alice has value. I just didn’t get all of the sounds right and wanted to change it an hour after I posted it. And still want to change it. It’s probably the closest I got to a “contractual obligation track” this year, but it’s still redeemable.

Above all, no matter how I feel about things right now, I am very pleased that I wrote them all. As the saying goes, “If you had fun, you won.” Now I’m not sure I’d call the experience with some of them “fun,” but each provided some form of reward, so: Winners!

So, more winners than losers. Actually, most of the losers are pieces of software that disappointed me or were too frustrating to use and that I’ll be removing from my standard template. I also didn’t use a couple of things that I had planned on, so I’ll have to do those experiments as the year goes on. That ties in with my desire to write a lot more outside of February, though, so… accidental winner.

Metrics, Statistics, and Other Miscellanea

My total track count on the official site is now 279. I think I posted a pre- and post-effects version of Jigsawz in 2021, but I personally only count it as one track. If I participate again next year (more on that below), I should break 300. Here are the statistics for all eleven years:

So a new record for total tracks with 30! I did two covers and had one “sort-of” extra bonus track⁶The Critic but because I did actually do some production on it, I’m counting it. What surprised me when I ran the numbers is that during the month, I felt like I was writing longer pieces overall, but despite there being 30 tracks, my total time wasn’t the highest, and my average track length was pretty much on par. Average length was identical to last year and just one second off my overall average. Median length was a bit longer than last year, but lower than most of the 2020s. I didn’t match my previous records for longest or shortest, though both were pretty close.

As far as listeners, I’m not really sure how indicative my site stats are, because I think most people listen on the official site. However, I was surprised to see 33 discrete listeners. I do one test listen when I post, but only one, so I can subtract 30 from the play count, and at least three from the number of listeners.⁷ My two computers and my phone. It may be higher than that if I forgot to turn off my VPN before listening, but let’s not do that and just pad the stats a bit. Over the years, the number of people listening on my site has grown, so that’s good, but I don’t think this info is overly valuable, so I probably won’t track it in the future. I’m also moving to a different audio player for the site. I’ll lose some of the functionality I had, but I’ll be gaining some other stuff that’s better.

Part of my previously mentioned moratorium is a realization I had during the holidays that I should divert all the money I was spending on new stuff to marketing and advertising. This is an area where AI has been incredibly helpful to me. So I’ll still be watching my various metrics, but the focus is going to be on growing an audience and, ideally, increasing actual sales. I’ll be releasing a few albums this year, and a lot of that content will be coming from Song-A-Day work.

Is This the End?

Last year, I had a few moments where I thought that maybe this life-changing and positive endeavor had run its course. I wasn’t really feeling all that challenged or rewarded from the effort. That softens over the year as I listen to what I did and realize that it probably wouldn’t exist without the work in February.

My first participation in 2016 led to me leaving a career and attempting to start another one. The new one, while changing my life massively for the better, hasn’t turned out to be fiscally viable. Yet. My pivot to being radically business-focused for this year may turn things around, so I’m not hanging up the MIDI cables just yet, but I definitely have to change the overall approach.

Mary has also started feeling the stress and drain⁸See: Leave the Light On of her job, and I want to take that pressure off of her. Additionally, I still have that itch to make things better wherever I can, so I’m starting to look for a new corporate gig. If you know anyone who needs a well-educated, lateral thinking, iconoclastic problem solver, please put me in touch!

Getting a new “day job,” however, would mean a reduced focus on Song-A-Day. I don’t think I’ll stop doing it, but as I put it to another participant, this may have been my last “maximum effort every day” year. I guess it will really depend on what’s going on with the rest of my life in eleven months.

If you’re still with me, thanks for reading and listening! I welcome and encourage comments, feedback, questions, and endless, adoring praise. Constructive criticism is also welcome, I guess.⁹😉 I have some stretch-goal-level plans for the year, so I’ll likely be writing more here in the coming months, detailing new ventures, album releases, and more.

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Notes

• 1
  Discussed in February but briefly: I have a shortcut on my phone that identifies music I’m hearing and adds it to an Apple Music playlist. Anytime I hear something (in a movie or show, a store, or even just when I have some streaming station on) that I think is fun, cool, interesting, or weird enough that I want to hear it again, I run this shortcut. The resulting playlist is an algorithm-breaking mish-mash of eclecticism.
• 2
  I’m defining a song as anything where I’ve written lyrics, normally with a melody, but not necessarily. The main thing is that there are lyrics that someone or something will be singing/saying over music.
• 3
  The Face of Adversity, for example, would not be at all enjoyable if it was just me and a piano. It would be funny, but probably not enjoyable.
• 4
  Climbing Crow Hill
• 5
  Malfunctioning Lullaby
• 6
  The Critic
• 7
  My two computers and my phone. It may be higher than that if I forgot to turn off my VPN before listening, but let’s not do that and just pad the stats a bit.
• 8
  See: Leave the Light On
• 9
  😉