The February Project

While I've been playing guitar for about 20 years, and playing in bands for most of that time period, I've done very little songwriting. There are a lot of reasons, ranging from playing in bands that had a "designated songwriter", to a need to get overly complex to avoid seeming trite, to general discomfort with my singing voice to a confusion as to when to STOP writing.

Around the time I started playing in bands, I started listening to metal and progressive music. When you're listening to Dream Theater and Genesis, song-writing seem pretty daunting... most of their best songs are over 10 minutes long. I might have been less intimidated if I listened to more Ramones.

I did write a few songs in high school for a joke band I was in, and again in college for a frat rock band I played in. But I hadn't done any serious songwriting until about 2000, when I moved to the NY area and hooked up with a good friend's girlfriend and started playing small clubs around the city. She was the main songwriter (and sole lyric writer), but I wrote music on about half the songs we did. A few of my tracks ended up on her CD, which you can still pick up on Amazon.

Shortly after we split paths in 2001, I dropped the guitar for a while thanks to work and family commitments. I still played around the house, but just for my own amusement.

Now, my kids are a little older, my job is a little more chill and I'm out of New York. I've been playing with my cover band for a few years, and am feeling more musically confident than I have since I was 18. But I still haven't done much songwriting.

Last January, I did some work with Laurie (aka Mixtapes and Meltdowns) on some stuff for February Album Writing Month (FAWM). We collaborated on 4 or 5 songs, and it was a good time. As I've mentioned here before, one of our collaborations ended up on a FAWM CD. But the idea of FAWM was pretty daunting... 14 songs in 28 days.

Sometime in December, I decided I was going to try it this year.

And now, it's February, and I'm out of the gates. I spent January revamping the Man Cave to create a nice working space, and setting up a new recording environment. And so far, it's been pretty nice. I love having a comfortable place to create stuff, and I've got tools that are helping create the sounds (and songs) that I want to.

After having written maybe a dozen songs over the last 20 years (and only 4 or 5 sets of lyrics), I've put out three complete songs in a little more than two days. I can't keep up that pace for long, but I've got some collaborators lined up for both writing and recording, so that should help it along.

So, this is a long winded way of saying that posting will probably be even lighter than usual in February. I'll report in now and then, but I'll mostly be spending a lot of time in my basement yelling into a microphone.

Till then...