A Song A Day: #1

I've always been in awe of prolific people. When I write a song I'm usually quite pleased with the result, but the occasions when I actually manage to see one through to the end - music, lyrics and all - come around less often than Halley's comet. Whereas there are some people for whom it seems like the easiest thing in the world. Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields is one such jammy git. The album 69 Love Songs is, well, sixty-nine songs in total. Most of which are proper songs, with middle 8s and everything. And the album i is equally maddening: all the songs begin with the letter I and are arranged in alphabetical order - as if he's got a whole index-worth of songs in his locker, and has just chosen to put out one twenty-sixth of them. Similarly, it's said that Ed Harcourt writes, on average, a song a day. I'm lucky if I write one a year.

A while ago I got to thinking that it would be a fun project to force myself to write a song a day. That way, I figured, after a month you'd have 30 songs, many of which would be crap, but a few of which might be salvageable. With a bit of luck it would also push me out of my comfort zone as a songwriter and encourage me to write about anything and everything, rather than just about my own romantic failures (plentiful though they are).

Well, last night I decided it's time to bite the bullet, after prompting from my friend Emma (who has agreed to try to do it too - but she's in full-time employment, and I do nothing all day). The Song A Day project starts here. I'll try to do a week's worth, and then if that succeeds I might push for a month. Anyway, I'll use this blog to keep track of my progress.

It had got to about 7pm when I realised I hadn't done anything. I duly sat down at the piano, fiddled around for a bit, and came up with a few musical ideas including one with quite a nice repeating melodic pattern. It sounded, perhaps not surprisingly, a lot like a Magnetic Fields track. Then I had dinner, and with it, a glass of cider. I took the glass of cider back to the piano and started to think about lyrics. And - you've guessed it - I looked at the cider and thought "what rhymes with cider?"

I came up with a verse that didn't make much sense on its own, but rhymed:

Spider
Off his face on white cider
Like a bike with no rider
Tumbled into a ditch on the side of the road

Then I tried to fit some kind of narrative around this. It's an odd way of writing, I'll admit, but it's worked for me before. I decided that the song could be a series of little vignettes from a boozy night among some kids in the countryside. The next thing to come was the chorus:

Round here everybody makes their own jam
And we have to make all our own fun but no-one gives a damn

I was pretty pleased with this and felt it set a good tone for the song - light-hearted but maybe with some genuine teen angst underlying it. So I cobbled together 5 more short verses, full of forced rhymes and also vaguely Lily Allenish stuff about getting pissed and giving head - which felt a bit strange, and not very me, but appropriate for the character singing the song. I'm usually so literal in my songs that it's nice to do a bit of storytelling.

So it's done. 1 day, 1 song. 100% success rate so far. Whether it's a good song is another question, of course. It's called Everybody Makes Their Own Jam.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's result. I will get round to recording rough versions of these at some point and will put them on myspace.