I didn’t think I had any songwriting goals for the upcoming year. None of my music resolutions for the year (unlike last year) had anything to do with songwriting. And, in fact, the songwriting reflection I did on last year’s songwriting was all about how much I feel like I’d figured out this songwriting thing and really feel like a songwriter. But Timmy Riordan has declared an upcoming Fearless Songwriter Week, and in the facebook event notification about it asked us what our songwriting goals were for the upcoming year. I initially responded by saying something like “I met last year’s goals, learning that I could write a lot of songs quickly.” I’m really proud of the songs I wrote last year and pleased with the way I wrote them, and wasn’t feeling the need to try to accomplish anything in particular this year with songwriting. (Heck, even writing more great songs will create difficult decisions as I have to figure out which ones to put on my next CD). But the more I thought about that question the more I realized that there were some things that I’d like to work on in my songwriting, and it mostly comes down to more musical variation. I’m great with topical variation – I’m not the kind of songwriter who writes about my day or my life and thus runs the risk of running out of material or having all my songs focus on the same subjects. But I clearly have a musical style – fingerpick-y, in either the key of G or D (the latter was new this past year) in terms of chord shapes, about XXX bpm. I should branch out more. I did that a little bit in the first Fearless Songwriter week I did at the end of last summer, inspired in part by Peter Mulvey’s Song Deconstruction workshop. He was talking about one of his newest songs (which might be called I Already Know), and how the lyric that started it sounded like it was going to sound like too many of his other songs and every other singer-songwriter-y song on its topic, and he didn’t feel like writing that song. So instead he put it in a completely different rhythm, got inspired by it, and that song emerged. At least two of the songs I wrote during that week (one of which I’ve played out and one of which I need to revise a bit – especially because Vance Gilbert really likes it so it is worth finalizing) are in pretty different rhythmic approaches from the ones I’m used to, and it was kind of fun doing that. And one has a different chord progression, too – it’s based around a Bm-F#m-G-A repeating pattern. Oh – and this is likely to be the subject of an upcoming blog post, which I actually started writing earlier – I also would like to do more by way of instrumentally arranging my songs, using interesting picking patterns, riffs, etc. (In fact, I’d like to write a song or two that start with an unusual and memorable riff.) So I guess I do have some songwriting goals for the year (in addition to simply writing great songs). Let’s try for some new keys, tempos, rhythms, and riffs!