About a year and a half ago I began a weekly Saturday routine of heading to a coffeeshop for lunch (and coffee!) and spending the time planning the next week (or month or year) of music projects. When 2024 approached, I considered what I could do as an energy lifting project to keep me focused and on task during the upcoming year. My busy performance season is in the summer, so it made perfect sense to begin a project in the winter. By the time summer rolled around when I was busy with outdoor gigs, I would be on a roll with the new plan!
So in 2024 I started (and completed) a new thing! What started as a creative idea that came to me sitting at the coffeeshop developed into a whole year long strategy: Write one song per month (about the month) and then release it as a simple stripped-back acoustic song plus a lyric video! Each song would simply bear the name of the month followed by the word (Acoustic). As a collection they would be called Time Flies … An Acoustic Calendar. The journey had begun!
Watching it unfold and looking back in retrospect, people have inquired as to how that experience was for me … hence this blog reply! In a nutshell, it was fun, hard, challenging, rewarding, more difficult than I ever imagined. It was all of those things and more. Here’s the breakdown.
Hard Things: Theme, recording, keeping on schedule. While the “month” of the year as a theme was pretty wide open, I had months where I struggled to find an overriding concept that tied in well with the month at hand. Some songs were hard to record and it was challenging to keep each one fresh, not sounding like others in the series. I had my favorites and felt that some were stronger than others, but in looking back, overall I am very pleased.
The schedule (even for someone who LOVES lists and keeping on task) actually got confusing at times. I had to plan out a written week by week plan for writing the song, recording the song, submitting the mastered song for distribution in time for the first of each month, then editing a lyric video to be ready for release at the same time! Looking back I can see now that also doing a second video series (that released on the 15th of each month) was almost too much to keep up with at times!
Good Things : Sense of accomplishment, increase in listeners, youtube subscribers and video comments, plus a forward momentum throughout the year. I’m going to talk about these in reverse order. The forward momentum was helpful to keep myself motivated during bleak winter months or times of sheer lethargy. The engagement, particularly on YouTube, was a big perk! The number of people exposed to the new music, and even commenting and liking it was especially encouraging. Last but not least, the sense of accomplishment was great at the end, as well as a genuine thankfulness (and relief) to have seen the project through to completion!
SO, for the record, to those of you who asked, overall the challenge was a wonderful learning experience. I’m very thankful for the growth in me as a songwriter. And I have a nice repertoire of month songs that I can play live to be enjoyed throughout the year! So, thanks for asking, and thank you most of all for your interest and support of my music! Here’s to all the ideas, dreams and challenges of 2025 my friends, let’s go!