About a month and a half since the last post. I’m sorry about that. Actually, at the time I’m writing this, no one is reading, so it’s completely fine. Whew.
Since the last post, in real time, I’ve done two open mics. That was a major rubicon crossing event for me. At this point it seems like basically no big deal to stand up and sing at an open mic.
It was tempting to get stuck in a rut of just going to open mics and making that my focus. Luckily, which seemed like a bummer at the time, my work schedule moved to me working on open mic nights. So what have I been doing instead?
My major focus has been on writing songs. Lyrics have always been difficult for me to hone in on. I could get a phrase or something, but for the most part it has been impossible for me to capture a theme into a song.
After I went to watch, not play at, the open mic, a song just popped out. It took a little tweaking, but really it was all there. It’s helpful when it happens like that. I performed it the next week.
That kind of opened the floodgates for me on how to do it. I started writing lyrics every day. Sometimes they’re garbage, most of the time there’s something there that can be distilled out, and sometimes the whole thing basically comes right out waiting for structure and tweaking.
I started going through my old lyric sketches, which is what I call my daily writing. From getting my first song written in late December to mid-February, I was able to pull together 38 songs in folders on the computer. Some of them were basically finished lyrics, and some of them were solid pieces that needed some work. Most of them needed editing.
I was really hoping, in my best-case scenario, to get 20 songs this year. I would like to release an album and enough singles to keep the Spotify algorithm interested. So 38 could mean a lot of possibilities, even if a few of them get thrown out.
At this point I probably have 30 through their second revision, ready for getting some music on tracks. I’ve started that process, which I figure will be a gentle transition beginning with the songs that appeared in the more fully formed states.
More to come.
