I signed up to do February Album-Writing Mont. Fourteen (or 14.5, officially) songs to write in the month of February. It’s daunting, to say the least. I don’t write songs quickly, and I’m going to try to write a lot of them in a short period of time. So although I can’t start writing the songs for this project before February 1st, but I can start to gather resources. One, obviously, is to look through old songwriting notebooks; there I jot down song ideas or potential lyric lines, and many of them never go anywhere. There are probably some interesting ideas that never got taken up. Likewise, I generally make sure there’s a notebook on the table beside my bed, so that when I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea or a phrase I have somewhere to write it down, because I know I won’t remember it in the morning. That one will be a bit more challenging to mine for ideas; not only are any song fragments interspersed with notes reminding myself to pay the electric bill or send a thank-you note to my aunt, but they were written in the dark when I was at least half asleep – I can’t always make out what I was intending to convey. But still, it will be interesting to see what ideas might be lurking in those places. A second approach is to give myself challenges. I love having assignments (as I’ve mentioned in many previous blog posts); you need a starting point for a song (or anything you’re writing) and an assignment or a challenge narrows down the universe of possibilities. I’ve found that narrowing expands creativity, as ironic as that sounds. (It actually makes sense when you think about it; specificity is key to most successful writing, and you need to have something to be specific about.) I also like being made to focus on something unexpected, weird, or hard. It’s the challenge of it – how can I make this work? – that engages me; it’s fun to do something challenging and much less fun to do something easy or banal. So that’s where you come in. It’s been said that you can’t tickle yourself, and I think it’s similarly difficult to give yourself a writing assignment, especially if the goal is to assign something unexpected. I’ll do it (heck, I’ve got 14.5 songs to write; it’ll have to involve telling myself what to do), but it would be great to have others give me assignments/challenges/suggestions. There’s a trick to doing it well. It has to be specific, and unusual. The first song I wrote in my current period of songwriting was an assignment from Bob Franke to write a response to Dave Carter’s song Cowboy Singer. Another song was a challenge to write about “where they don’t belong.” Either of those is much better than a challenge to “write a song about autumn” or “write a love song.” A good assignment could be a topic (“write about your first pet”) or a title (write the title track for the “Passionfruit Hypothesis” CD), or some other things (“write a song that uses the words “lemon” “staircase” and “Lithuanian” in the same song”; “write a song about a train in the form of a letter”) – weird is good. Please – I’ve turned comments off on this blog because of spammers, but you can post on my facebook fan page (or regular facebook if you’re a “friend”) or even email me directly. I’d love to hear your assignments/challenges.