7 Songs in 21 Days — Reaching Into the Void

That’s a new song every three days, for those of you who are mathematically challenged.

Erica and I sat down with John (our business partner) last week and decided that we did, indeed, want to have a finished master in our hands by mid-May of this year. As we back-timed a hypothetical production timetable from that date, (we picked May 7… I dunno, I guess it just had a ring to it) we realized that all songwriting needed to be done by the end of this month.

I know that many artists like to write in the studio, producing as they go. I have, as a writer, not yet successfully gotten to this place. The hardest part of the process for me is the part I call reaching into the void. It’s the nothingness, the blank page… the infinite possibility. A spark is required to fill that void, some might say a divine spark. An idea, a phrase, dare I say… a hook… must emerge from the void.

It’s fumbling in the dark, if you ask me. I’ll find something, grab onto it, but I often have no idea what it looks like or how it behaves until I wrestle it out of darkness and into the light. Then the shaping and editing begins, as many of my song ideas are unwieldy and angular. They require much tweakage to get themselves shaped up into a 3-4 minute, hooky pop song.

I’ve already written and demoed up 5 songs for the new record. I am quite fond of them all, and one in particular has really pushed everyone’s buttons. I had about 7-8 other “starts” or ideas that happened during the process of creating those five songs, and it would be much easier to revisit them in an attempt to hit my goal. Erica challenged me to start with a clean slate, and see what emerged. I agreed. The fact is, if any of those ideas were strong enough, my mind would not have let me stop until they were fully realized.

Why 7 songs? I dunno. I’d like to get to 12. I enjoy long records. I hope to make a record that people can lose themselves in. If nothing else, I’d like to have options if we want to pear it down to a 10 song record. Options are good… unless you have too many options, and then it closely resembles a void, where anything is possible and absolutely nothing is decided. (Sigh)

So here I am again, on a Monday morning, staring down the abyss. Three days from now, I need to have a song demoed and rokkin, or I will be behind schedule. I drink my coffee, fire up Logic and the Rhodes, and prepare to roll up my sleeves.

Reaching into the void can be messy, after all. You never know what you’re gonna pull out.