I was a big fan this past year of the RealWomenRealSongs project that the songwriter Cary Cooper put together. She gathered fourteen female songwriters who each agreed to write a song each week to a (quite general) prompt and post a video of the song on a specified day – two songwriters per day. Some folks I knew personally or whose music I like were involved in the project, and it was great to hear the new songs and the different ways the artists interpreted the different prompts. Some excellent songs came out of the process. They finished their year of songwriting at the end of the summer. On October 1st Cary posted in a couple places a call to audition for the second round – there were three open slots and she was opening the process to interested songwriters. The audition process was exactly as the regular process during the year would go: we were given a prompt and had a week to write a song and record a video of us singing it. (We also had to answer some questions on video about ourselves and why we wanted to participate.) I decided to throw my hat in the right. I’d missed a previous message telling us there would be an audition process and simply saw the call with the prompt and a week’s deadline. So I didn’t have a lot of time to decide if this was indeed something I wanted to do. But I’m happy when I’m regularly writing songs, and I like prompts and deadlines as ways to get me writing songs (and different songs than I would otherwise write). This year is a better time for me to think about doing such a thing than usual – on sabbatical I have more time overall, and it’s also less scheduled. And being a part of this kind of process would get my songs in front of people who wouldn’t otherwise har them. I realized that it was a long shot. I’m not a full-time musician (unlike a number of the people who participated), I’m not that well known, and I’m not in the inner circle of the folks who participated previously (some of whom I assume are continuing). I’m also not a particularly underrepresented demographic, being a New England folk singer-songwriter; we grow on trees out here. But I thought I’d give it a shot. The prompt was “possibility.” Which is quite representative of the types of prompts throughout the first year of the project, and is the more-general-than-I-would-like type of prompt that generally drives me crazy. But my songwriting this year, even in challenges, has been pretty low stress, so I decided to let it roll around in my head and see what I came up with. On Tuesday, the day I saw the prompt, I came up with a couple lines that started to set a scene of kids at the beginning of the school year (something about new sharpened pencils and being primed with potential). I wrote some draft lines for half of the first verse, and snatches of melody, including for the chorus. What turned out to be interesting about the process was that, unlike almost any song I’ve written, I worked on it a little bit each day for most of the days I had available. And it felt like I was making progress, and it was turning into a song I liked. (It ended up with an unusual rhyme scheme that tripped me up a bit; something I might tackle in another blog post, but that I think ultimately does some good things for the song.) In any case, I finished it, recorded a video on my iPhone (first time I’d recorded a video of me that way) in one take, and posted it according to the instructions. I didn’t obsess over the answers to the questions or the quality of my video, deciding to just be myself and not spent a lot of effort in a way that would make at best a marginal difference. And I let it go, feeling pretty good about the process: I liked the song and am glad I wrote it, would be thrilled if I were chosen but would be okay if I didn’t get picked, partly because I knew it was a long shot and partly because not having to write a song a week for a year would also give me more time for other things. I heard back from Cary yesterday: I wasn’t chosen. She indicated (although one never knows how much of this is diplomacy) that the selection did mostly come down to trying to fill unfilled demographics. But the nice thing is that she asked whether I would be interested in being a substitute for the project. While she didn’t specify exactly what that entailed, she did say that if any of the regulars dropped out (which happened with several people last year), they would go first to the substitutes to replace them. So, there you have it. It was about as nice a process as I could imagine – I got a song out of it, am glad I gave it a shot, and didn’t stress about the process at any point in time (which, for me, is nothing short of miraculous). And, who knows, maybe I’ll have the chance to participate in some way in the upcoming year. And maybe I won’t. But regardless I’m happy for the opportunity to audition, and will follow this next group of songwriters in the project.