Next up in reviewing the last year in music is a look at my songwriting from 2012. It was, without a doubt, the most productive songwriting year I’ve ever had. I credit, in part, my new year’s resolution last time around to participate in February Album Writing Month (FAWM). The main lessons I draw from my productive songwriting year is the advantage of constraints – on both time and topic. Counting any song that got to a complete draft (full lyrics, even if some of them might be placeholders) and a melody, I think I completed 25 songs, plus almost all of another one I decided not to finish on the great Canadian Maple Syrup heist. First, during FAWM, I did indeed write the 14 songs that the challenge required. Of those, two – Pan-Religious Bluegrass Band, and Susanna’s Song – are regularly in my live shows, and the latter of those two is one of my three favorites from the year. Two others I haven’t played live yet (Ludlow, 1914 and You Remind Me) but I like enough to bring in at some point, and they are serious candidates for the next CD. And another three (Underground, Half of a Song, and Many Years More) are not quite where I want them to be yet, but revising them to get them there is on my near-term agenda. I also did the Fearless Songwriter challenge at the end of the summer, which involved writing seven songs in seven days, all of them from prompts. That one was astonishingly productive – of those seven songs, three (Dandelion Wine, What I’ll Leave Behind, and Find My Place) are already regularly in my shows – with Dandelion Wine on the list of three favorites from the year – and another two (If I Could Tell You and Crooked Plow) in the “revise soon” bin because I think they’re close to being good. One of the others that didn’t make the cut has been running through my head lately, which suggests that, at minimum, it might be scavenged for parts at some point. And I wrote four songs outside of those challenge periods. One of them – I Was Here – is, in my opinion, the best song I wrote all year. Two others (Not Afraid to Fall and Snake Eyes, Boxcars) are under consideration for revisions. Only one of those four didn’t make the cut (along with the previously mentioned maple syrup song). So what lessons do I draw from this year of songwriting? The first is that time pressure is a good thing. The challenges I participated in required that I write a bunch of songs in a short period of time. And even when not participating in challenges, I took part in songwriting workshops/groups that involved fixed-time writing – go into a room and write for 45 minutes; come back and share what you’ve written. The time pressure for writing had two different, and equally important, effects. The first is simply that it got me writing. The more you write, the more you write. It sounds silly, but the only way to write songs is to write songs, and participating in challenges in which I’ve committed to writing songs gets me to write songs. The other effect of time pressure is that I override my internal editor and free my muse. When I’m writing fast, I have to grab ideas out of the air, and move on to the next one without worrying too much about what I have is exactly right. And some of those lines that seem like the biggest stretch turn out to be the best lines. I allow myself to write things that I would otherwise censor, and it turns out I’m pretty creative on the fly. I also don’t give myself time (because in most of those contexts I don’t have the time!) to dither about whether I have anything worth saying. That observation is key. I do, in fact, have things worth saying. But if I let myself ask that question for too long, I’m likely to conclude that I don’t, or might not, and stop writing. So writing quickly has not only the micro advantage of letting me reach for lines I might not have tried out, but letting me reach for entire songs I might not have written. I can always decide afterwards whether they’re worth keeping or not – and some of them aren’t; and I can – and do – revise the songs that are good. And an awful lot of them are, and they wouldn’t have come about, or been as good, if I’d written them more slowly. The other lesson I take from my year is that constraints of other sorts are good, too. For the Fearless Songwriter challenge there were daily prompts, and I wrote to them (as did pretty much everyone else doing the challenge). And for FAWM I sometimes set my own challenges (which resulted in Susanna’s Song, a re-telling of an existing song from a different perspective). Prompts, or other types of constraints, also have a couple different effects. The first is that the number of things on which you could write at any point in time is infinite. How do you figure out what to write about? Again with the opportunity for dithering. But if you have a topic or other requirement, it gives you a starting point. More importantly, constraints lead to creativity. My best story of a prompt from this year was the Fearless Songwriter prompt of “succotash.” I was despondent at that prompt. I could not imagine how anyone could write a real song on the topic of succotash. I was certain that any such song would be a “ditty” – that would, at most, be sung once at the moment of completion. (And, in fact, most of the songs that people wrote from this prompt were novelty songs of some sort.) But I was absolutely determined to find a way to write a real song. So I did some research on succotash, starting with the discovery that it first became popular during the Great Depression and dust bowl. Which then led me to looking into what other foods people ate at that time, and a bit more about what was going on with food during that era . . . and eventually led to the song Dandelion Wine, which is another of my favorites for the year. And it’s a song I never would have written without that absolutely ridiculous prompt, for which I could not be more grateful. The biggest lesson I take from this year is that I’m a songwriter. I’m no longer worried about whether I’ll be able to continue to write songs, or whether my best songs are behind me. The best way to write songs is to write songs, and I hope to keep doing that.