On the eve of February Album Writing Month, I’ve been thinking about possible songs to write . . . especially because I want to get a jump on my songwriting in the first few days of the month so I get a few songs under my belt and don’t feel so daunted by the ones that remain to be written. Here are a few ideas I have that I’d like to try to take up:  A birthday song that’s an alternative to that horrible (and copyrighted!) dirge that everyone sings, built off of the idea of a song I wrote for my grandmother’s 90th birthday.  A song that could be on an album entitled “The Passionfruit Hypothesis” – largely because that was the working title of my second CD long before it was a CD (mostly as a joke, but doesn’t it seem like a cool album title?). But in order to title an album that, I’d need to have a song that mentions it somehow.  My favorite suggestion when I asked people a week ago for songwriting assignments (it’s not too late for you to submit yours!) was Dan Tappan’s instructions to write a song about a stapler. I have no idea how to approach it, but that’s part of why it’s intriguing.  Songs with spam lines in them. For awhile, a few years ago, the spambots were including real words in odd combinations (often as subject lines) to try to fool spam filters. They were often weirdly poetic, and I kept a collection of them for future use. (a few from the list include “down-payment generation,” “jump-rope housewives” “irreverence passionately” and “trinity infiltrator” but I have a much longer list; they’re pretty fantastic.)  A song with the phrase “mail-order mandolin” which I thought of but never wrote back when I was in Florida for a semester, missed my mandolin, and ordered a cheap (and ultimately, alas, unplayable) mandolin through the mail.  I kept trying to write a song awhile back called “letting go of leaving” and it never got anywhere.  A song inspired by a musicians-for-Obama concert about how you make real change in the world. (Also one I’ve tried to write before and failed. But maybe the upcoming election will help?) A few others I’d like to write (but have no particular ideas about how to bring about):  Another funny song. It’d be great to have a second one (to go along with Resolution) in my repertoire, but I have odd criteria – it can’t just be funny, it has to have some broader significance.  Another environmental song. Given what I do in the rest of my life (and also the reception that Bigger, Faster, and More has gotten) I’d really love to have another song on an environmental topic. It’s hard to do it well, though.  In general, story songs are my strongest. So I hope to write some in the next month. But I rarely start out knowing where a story is going (or even knowing that there is one), so it’s not always clear that that’s something I can plan. And do let me know if you have specific ideas/suggestions; I’m going to need all the inspiration I can get to knock out 14.5 songs in the next 29 days . . . .