A quick post about three songs on the way to February Album-Writing Month success (she says, optimistically . . .). Let’s see, what songs haven’t I told you about yet? Here are three that I’m reasonably satisfied with, but that don’t rise to the level of favorites (I’ve got another one of those coming for the next blog post). Song #9 was inspired by a phrase I woke up with “so I went down to the station, and I hopped and outbound train.” It also might address the fact that I haven’t written a train song yet, although perhaps there aren’t enough trains in here to count:

I like the melody a lot (and the way the song feels), as well as the changing choruses. Not sure the song really takes off yet, but I’m okay with this one. Song #10 also came from a middle of the night phrase. This one – what would you do if you knew that you could not fail? – rattled around in my mind for awhile, and I eventually decided to take it in a direction that might not be the expected one. I think I was a little fed up with the standard new age-y “leap and the net will appear” approach to thinking about the world. The third song in this series was written as part of a FAWM songwriting challenge. There is a community of people doing this February songwriting effort and they come up with songwriting games and assignments both to help them complete songs and for fun. This is the first challenge I participated in (mostly because I’m a newbie – called a “fawmling” in the jargon of the site – and don’t know about most of them until it’s too late). The one I participated in is called a “morph.” Chains of songwriters are designated. The first person writes a song. The next person in the chain is supposed to write a song that is half (however you want to define it) of the song the person before has written, and half a completely new song (and you’re not supposed to listen to anything in the chain until after you’ve done yours). The song before me was this one .
It was a fascinating challenge. I later found out that all three songs in the chain before me kept the lyrics and the basic story more or less the same, and worked with changing melody and arrangement. I, instead, kept the chord progression and the melody in the chorus, and I took a number of specific words that I then built a song and a story around. I think it’s a reasonably solid song, and it was an interesting exercise: I’m in the home stretch now and it looks like I’ll make it. The final set of songs will come in a blog post soon!