I thought I’d report in at how my experience with February Album Writing Month is going so far. As I write this post it’s the sixth day and I’ve written three songs, so I’m right on schedule. After the Fearless Songwriter experience, with seven songs in seven days, two days per song seems downright leisurely. So far I give each of my three songs about a B+. They’re good. There’s something I like about each one of them. I don’t know how many of them will last past the month or knock other songs out of my rotation. The first song I wrote this week came from the songwriting exercise I (literally) dreamed up while I was in Mexico, in which the idea was to write a vowel-based nonsense word chorus in a song about some population dealing with either a fire or a flood. On the first day of the month I found myself singing “Woh ho the water is rising, who ho oh.” So there’s where I went. (I never did figure out how to spell those syllables and so didn’t even represent them in the written version of the song.) I pretty much went where the song was leading, and decided to make it subtly (I genuinely can’t tell whether it’s too subtle or not subtle enough) about climate change as the thing that’s leading to the flood. I like the woh ho bits; it’s fun to sing. The Water Is Rising The second song also had a prompt; I had signed up for the “year of songs” challenge through the FAWM website in which we were each given a month of the year; the one I ended up with was October. I guess what started out in my mind was that Sophie (my beloved dog) died in October, but I really just started out with images of the month and ended with the last time I saw someone (unspecified about who or why) during that month; the effect was meant to be somewhat sad, so I chose images that way. My favorite phrase from the song is “wishes unspoken, now brittle and broken.” I also write a riff for it that I like; I’ve been trying to do more of that. When October Rolls Around Then I got to the next song with nary an idea. I decided, last night, that I would just play around with the guitar and see if I could write a riff that might lead somewhere. Instead I ended up writing a really pretty guitar part – more extended than a riff. And started singing a melody over it, that had an A part and a B part (with the same guitar part under each). I love the way it sounds, and it sounded to me like a lullaby, so I started thinking about what would be in a lullaby that I could sing without feeling silly about it. Came up, including – alas – in the middle of the night, with a set of lyrics I think work. I started with “nightingales will gather and sing you lullabies” in the B part, which I turned into a chorus. And once I had nightingales in it I decided to mostly go with the nature theme. This is pretty much the first time I’ve ever written a song that way – music, then melody, then lyrics. Nightingales Will Gather I’m really pleased with aspects of all of these songs, and each has a potential context in which I could imagine it being useful. None of the three of them so far has bowled me over, though; I probably need to write a story song for that to happen. Which means that I need to figure out what I want to tell a story about. We’ll see what comes next.