I’ve just signed up for February Album Writing Month (now, that’s a redundant name if ever I heard one. What is February, if it isn’t a month? It should just be “Album Writing Month”, surely. Yes, yes, I’m sure awm.org was already taken. But I digress), a project in the spirit of NaNoWriMo which sets the challenge of writing 14 songs in 28 days.
(Update… here’s my FAWM profile page.)
On the face of it, this is a somewhat stupid thing for me to do. I’m far too busy in February to dedicate the majority of my spare time to writing songs. By my current count I have 7 days in which I’m completely occupied, including the first Oxford Geek Night, raww.orgy and BarCamp London; I have talks to write for two of the above (which may entail doing something webbishly geeky some time soon so that I have something to talk about in the first place), and ideally a bit of music for the other; then there’s Forever (website down? ooh, that’s not good) and Breakpoint looming not far ahead and vying for some sort of contribution from me; I’m meant to be doing some webmonkey work on Pouët while ideally not neglecting my own long-promised demoscene database site (and the ensuing Rails core hacking that’s going to be necessary to pull it off); and finally two projects (or is it three?) I’ve promised to do Spectrum music for. Oh, and there’s the whole eating and sleeping thing too.
So what on earth has possessed me to sign up for this? Well, proper songwriting is one of those things I’ve wanted to do for ages but never really done anything about. I regularly put aside bits of tunes, telling myself that one day I’ll wake up really keen to write some lyrics and hammer them out into a full song. It never happens though, and it’s now gone two years since I vowed to enter Eurovision. Now FAWM has come along, and it looks like it can provide the much needed motivation. I’m going to follow in the footsteps of that great muso of our time MJ Hibbett (of Hey Hey 16K fame), who in the extensive bonus material in his albums has often referred to the Great Song Unbunging – a brief period in which he sat down with his unused ideas, notes and dictaphone tapes and assembled them into complete songs. Unfortunately I don’t have the self-discipline to accomplish a Great Song Unbunging by myself, and so I’m leaping on this passing bandwagon rather than waiting for a less eventful month (June. What happens in June? It’s just a waste of space in the middle of the year) and then ending up not doing it at all. In short, not signing up to FAWM would just be a cop-out.
Still… I always find that I work best under pressure. Well, fastest anyway. And it could turn out to be one of those major life decisions that makes everything else fall into place. Maybe I’ll be able to use some of my material as the basis for a new demo. Or maybe I’ll end up doing a half-hour live set at BarCamp. Who knows.
Let the unbunging commence!