music i make

a song a day

Over the last year I’ve watched a new breed of song writers move into cyber-space. These folks create sites like Calendar Songs and Song A Week writing to a schedule. I think it’s wonderful, in fact, it’s something I’ve considered doing. So recently I set aside a week to see what I could do. Well…

I managed to write about six partial songs. Reflecting on them a week later, I think a few of them would be better merged into single pieces, and a few aren’t worth further development. An interesting experiment. More on this later.

Forcing myself to write got me to thinking. Many years ago I was recording a band in Nashville. We were working nights in a studio on music row, which housed a country “song factory“ during the day. It was interesting to see a work environment, not unlike many small businesses in America, where the job was to write hit songs. You put the monthly targets up on the whiteboard. Workers spend the day developing goods for a target customer. Something about this didn’t sit well with me. I was young and idealistic. OK, maybe a little ignorant.

Sometimes I am overtaken with a piece of art, or music and imagine it was created purely out of passion. Money, if any involved, was an insignificant byproduct of the art, but never it’s motivation. It’s romantic isn’t it. To a large extent, the Strong Tower and World Theatre albums were written in this manner. But that doesn’t mean these works are any more important than songs written in a ”song factory“. Musicians need to eat and even Mozart and Beethoven wrote for money by way of commissions. So maybe it’s fine that many songs are written to sell into a market. Who am I to say?

In the end, it comes down to what you make of the piece. After all, the song writer won’t be there in person to explain what was meant in this or that lyric. We listen, look and interact with art as individuals from our own unique perspectives.

Sometimes we connect with a piece of art. Regardless of how the creation came to be, I think that is wonderful thing.