It's a sure sign that your creative juices are running low when you find yourself typing "how to write an album" into the search bar late one night.
Unusually - for such a desperate plea to the Google Gods - I was given an intriguing answer: a songwriting challenge called February Album Writing Month (FAWM). It's essentially a lesser-known musical cousin of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), so I knew I was on to something; in 2011 I completed a whole 1,000 words of a 50,000 word novel - that's more novel than I'd written before in my life! Ever a sucker for a creative challenge, and with FAWM due to kick off on Saturday, I decided to get stuck in.
The premise is simple enough: participants are given the month of February to write an album of at least 14 songs. Only a rough demo of each one is necessary, but only a song with words and music and (hopefully not too unbearable) singing and playing will do.
To the mathematically challenged, this works out as an average of a song every two days. There once was a time when I could write a song in a double period of chemistry (to varying levels of success). But now that the realities of working life and doing my own laundry have taken hold, I'm lucky if I finish two a year.
But how to motivate myself to see this thing through to the finish line? Well, as much as I will no doubt come to regret it later, I've decided I will share the whole process with you, dear reader. On this here blog I will post ideas, lyrics and half-baked songs to (hopefully) inform, entertain, amuse and offend.
And with the best intentions of under-promising and over-delivering, the songs are going to be terrible...
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