a thing in 51 photos songwriting ...going through the hundreds of song sketches I'd recorded and making notes about the ones I liked most and wanted to keep working on. ...and then stayed up late taking a few of my song sketches... ...and turning them into multi-track recordings in Garageband. ...in December Didn't play very much in November, but recorded a lot more... Stayed up late going through all my song audio sketches and riffing on the ones from the past few months I liked. On Saturday, Craig invited me to perform a few of my original songs at a songwriting event put on by the Williamsburg School of Music. I sang two songs and it was my second time performing them in public. Stayed up late listening to all my song sketches for the past few weeks and highlighting the ones that I liked and wanted to keep working on. Melodies come to me in abundance but I always struggle to put words to them so it was fun to collaborate with her! ...and wrote some lyrics for some songs I was working on. Later that evening, she came over to my apartment... ...and organizing my song snippets. ...are the songs that I think show the most promise and that I should keep working on. I need a process to be creative and it's been fun taking a similar process that I've used to make this site for years and try to transport it over to songwriting. The working titles that I highlighted in orange... I took all these pictures so I'd have a backup of all my hard work in case I lost my little song workbook ...and grouping together the recordings that were related. ...and giving the different sketches working titles... ...going through all my recorded song sketches from the previous month... ...and group them by recording number and coming up with working song titles for the tracks. I like listening to each of the things I recorded many weeks later with an objective ear and trying to figure out the recordings that are related... Just like working on this website, I find it really cathartic to have an artistic process that has a recipe that involves a lot of manual work. I spent the evening going through the more than one hundred little song sketches I'd recorded throughout the previous month. After Kevin left I stayed up late recording some guitar tracks. Came home and wrote down all my song sketches from the previous month. Worked on some lyrics for the ones I liked most. Went home and spent the night playing music. Spent the evening adding some hot key licks to my songs in Garageband. Friday afternoon songwriting. Later that night I worked on... ...putting some lyrics to a few songs I'd written! Went back through all the recordings I'd made of song sketches over the past fews weeks and filed them away in my little songwriting book. Spent the evneing trying to put words to new song ideas. Spent some time recording some tunes! ...and recapped some more song sketches I'd written in December! Orange highlights are good things I want to circle back and keep iterating on! ...and writing them down into my song books and grouping them by name! Also spent the afternoon listening to the hundreds of little song sketches I did over the past few weeks.... ...working on writing songs! Recovery week. Spent the day... After recording a bunch of sketches I'd go back and listen to all of them, give them names and highlight the ones I liked in orange. In order to produce anything creative, I need to set up a system and then let it be the boss of things. lol. ...playing guitar and recording whatever little song ideas popped into my head... ...for hours and hours. I like to chart out pop-songs I love and then use them as templates for arranging my own songs later on! Here's a chart I made for the structure of Girls Just Want to Have Fun. I had decided to start doing open mic nights in the neighborhood and wanted to pick a set list of songs that I wanted to try out in front of an audience. Spent the evening working on songwriting! ...and recorded my 500th little song sketch in my phone's audio notebook! I like to have a process. After working out lyrics on paper, I try to commit them to a final digital copy when they're done! ...and tried to write lyrics for a song I was working on! (Music comes easily to me but the words are so much harder!) 
