Why Have I Written, Recorded, and Released 377 Original Songs Since July 2022?
In the summer of 2022, I began a Year-Long project with a simple goal: write songs chronicling the four seasons as I was experiencing them, and Try to Write and Record One Song per Day for a Year.
I had just moved to a part of the United States that actually had all four seasons (with dynamic weather!) after living in a very static, dry area in the West for 38 years that did not experience four seasons as people do on the East Coast or the Midwest. Along those lines, my initial goal was to write a song a day on average for an entire year. (I ended up exceeding the goal by quite a lot thanks to weekends where I could write numerous songs a day.)
I completed this project in the late Spring of 2023 with the release of the albums “Your Love is Better Than Life,” “Emerald,” and “Pearl.”
It was impossible to stop though. I was enjoying the journey too much, so I kept writing songs through the end of Summer 2023. It has essentially been a year-long effort of concentrated songwriting and recording. The last song recorded for this effort was “Step into the Fire,” which was written and recorded on August 11, 2023, and will be released on all digital music platforms on October 1, 2023. Technically, two other songs — “Dust Storms” and “Always Something New to Love About You” — were also written on August 11th, 2023, but those two songs have already been released on the album “Dust Storms” on August 15th, 2023.
The final song (“Step Into the Fire”) marks the 377th original song written and recorded since July 2022 when I began. 377 songs! What an artistically rich and rewarding journey it’s been.
2. Music-based People Watching, Observing of Life, and Day-to-Day journaling.
I have been an avid journal keeper for most of my life, and these journals are filled with observations not just about my life but observations of others and their lives as well — in the spirit of taking joy in seeing others discover and experience interesting moments in their lives and from a spirit of general curiosity about humanity. Instead of writing daily or weekly entries on paper, I decided to write songs on a weekly or even daily basis. The advancement of recording technology has been so staggering in recent years that it is a fairly simple process to quickly put a song together. I can write, record, and mix an entire song on a single lunch break. Years ago I earned a B.A. in Music Composition (with plenty of sound production courses) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Drawing on that training has helped speed along the writing/recording process and give (in my opinion) some decent quality and uniqueness to each song.
Using music as a substitute for journaling has allowed me to preserve simple memories and observations of meaningful human life (and witness some of its frustrations and villains), and to document insights from books, novels, and movies I’m enjoying.
Music has a magical way of not only preserving the basic information contained in memory but also its emotional and spiritual signatures — and oftentimes in vivid detail.
All of these things I’ve been able to preserve in a quick, easy-to-access cloud-based form, thanks to the now ubiquitous world of music streaming. Whether it’s Apple Music or YouTube, it’s so easy to flip open an app, find a particular album from a particular date, and relive the memory or insight I was trying to preserve. That has been the primary allure of releasing everything through these platforms.
The playlist-making capabilities of platforms like Apple Music are especially awesome as journaling tools because I can mix and match memories/insights from songs to build sonic scrapbooks.
I’ve released a large number of new albums that have previously unheard/new songs. However, occasionally, I release “new” albums that are really just new arrangements and combinations of different songs from past albums — my own curated playlists of the song “memories” I’ve created. These may look like “best of” albums and are sometimes titled that way for convenience in categorizing them on platforms, but their actual purpose is to present a unique curation and combination of previous material. Even changing the song order of an album without changing the songs creates an entirely new listening experience, in my opinion — assuming you’re a fan of listening to entire albums from beginning to end in an attempt to experience the intended song order/themes created by the artist (which I personally love doing with all my favorite artists).
This project of “song memories/observations” has aided me in remembering things in a way that’s more immersive and impactful than I had anticipated. It’s been a powerful, moving experience at times, especially during difficult seasons of life. It’s also been an outlet when frustration or despair over the darkness in the world becomes overwhelming.
Of course, many of these moments and insights I’ve placed behind symbolic language and metaphors to allow some privacy and to make the lyrical themes more striking. Many of the songs have nothing to do with me. They are written from someone else’s point of view as I’m trying to get into their headspace and life experience — someone whom I find inspiring or interesting from a book or news article or from a Bible story or an ancient manuscript (an attempt to time travel into their world). Many of them are light-hearted or simple reflections on a favorite scene from a film or a line from a book.
3. At this time, I don’t actively play shows.
Music has been a tool of reflection, encouragement, and empowerment against the forces of depression that are always at work in our society. It’s been a life preserver while attempting to navigate through a very complicated — and often very dark and sorrowful — world.
For example, you’ll notice that the first full album — “88 mph,” released Sept. 6, 2022 — has many road trip-based themes. I had just finished a big drive across 2,500+ miles of territory in the beautiful USA, and I was reflecting on all the little moments and insights from that experience.
It’s also a shout-out to one of my favorite films — the “Back to the Future” series — and the fun sci-fi theme of time travel.
It’s amazing to me that technology has come so far now that a project like this is even remotely possible. In the ‘90s when I was a teenager working odd jobs to buy precious (but expensive) recording time at a professional studio in the “big city” (Bakersfield, CA), I never dreamed that sound production tech would reach this point. It’s astonishing, and every time I record a song over a lunch break, a tinge of gratitude hits me.
All of this hints at a question that nags at anyone who has ever tried to make a career out of music in the last 23 years since the internet birthed the age of digital platforms:
Why make music (and attempt to do it on a serious/professional level of quality) when the ground is 1000% oversaturated with aggressively competing artists and predatory labels/handlers? Ultimately, it can't be for money, fame, or the approval of low/high art establishments. It has to be for something deeper so that the process of creation itself, whether anyone hears or praises it, is satisfying enough to continue with it. May we each find that place of contentment and carefree fun (because it's fun to release and share ideas/moments of music that reflect vital moments of our lives).
As mentioned earlier, the last song of this year-long project will be released on 10/1/23, called “Step Into the Fire,” which was written and recorded on August 11, 2023.
Thanks for stopping by and reading this!
Sincerely,
Kevin