As mentioned last week, I’m participating in my fourth year of February Album Writing Month, a challenge to oneself to write 14 songs in 28 days. I find I really enjoy it; it forces me to be creative on a schedule, and the community of songwriters involved are wonderful, supportive, and amazing.

It feels like home.

In any case, the first day of FAWM ’21, for me, was actually pretty great. I wrote and recorded two songs, and also nailed the first week’s Songwriting Challenge, What’s In A Name, which is about using a person’s name in the song title, like any number of song you can think of.

I wrote my first tune for the year very early this morning after taking care of my initial morning emails, feeling sorrow, frustration, and disdain, and pouring that feeling into a text editor. After I logged off for the day, I fired up my personal computer, inside my blanket fort (actually an improvised microphone isolation shield), set the lyrics quickly to music and recorded “Barely Hanging On”, which was one of the first twenty songs submitted this year (it was #17).

After doing that, I ran to the store to buy toilet paper, then came back, having a quiet house (girls off teaching dance class, boy upstairs gaming), I grabbed some notes from a while back while I read a certain book, started turning those into lyrics and music, and recorded A Quiet Uncommon Pleasant Place (Auri’ Song)”, based on my favorite character from Patrick Rothfuss’s series “The Kingkiller Chronicles.” I don’t have the scansion quite right, I think, but the demo I recorded sounds decent enough as a first draft.

Also, in one of those wonderful FAWM occurrences, I person I’ve never met listened to it several times in a row and felt obligated to tell me how much they liked it. See what I mean about supportive?

Anyway, I’ve got 12 more songs to go before February 28; I think I’ll get there. I may not note every single song from here on out, but I’ll link my profile page here, and you can always find it if you click the FAWM picture in the “tunes” section of the left sidebar.

So yeah, that’s my obsession for the next month; deal with it. I’ll write about real life later this week, I promise.