I’m at the tail end (only one more song to write!) of February Album Writing Month. It has been helped along by a Fearless Songwriter week, running alongside it (most of us in the Fearless Week were doing FAWM). That was particularly helpful for me, because there are songwriting prompts every day of the Fearless week, and I work well with prompts. One day the prompt was to write a song on an unfamiliar instrument. Although I like my prompts more topic- or word-based, this one was a useful prod. When writing so many songs so quickly I had started to fall into patterns; I was using similar time signatures, chord progressions, etc. And I wanted to break myself out of those patterns. So I picked up the banjo. It may have been more than a decade since I last played the banjo, and, even back then, I never really played it. I originally took it up the year before college when I spent the year hanging out at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. The style I play is clawhammer, which is the more traditional style, used to play fiddle tunes and that kind of music. Even when I did play, I’d never quite figured out how to sing and play at the same time – because I was mostly playing melodies rather than accompanying songs. I had a blast playing around with the banjo for this songwriting experience. I picked a tuning (G-modal) and played around with melodies – came up with a tune I liked a lot. I put words to that and made it a chorus; then wrote a verse melody. In part because of the tuning of the banjo and how the strings sit in relation to each other, it led me to a different sort of melody and rhythm than I would otherwise have written. And I tried to let the words be guided by the traditional feel of the music – starts out with a conversation to the little sparrow outside my window, and goes through nature and the seasons, using words and images I hope sound timeless. The catch was recording it (and thus playing it) to post on the FAWM website. My banjo picking skills were rusty and there’s that “never learned how to sing and play at the same time” issue. So the playing is a bit rough and took a number of tries to get all the way through a recorded version without too many mistakes for me to be willing to share it. But as an excuse to spend the day playing the banjo (not to mention, get a song I like out of the deal) it was excellent. I have stepped away from all the non-guitar instruments I play, because I just don’t have enough time to get good enough at them to play them (especially when I’m usually playing solo) in my songwriting-based shows. But I do need to remember that playing them is enough fun that it’s worth doing anyway.