I wrote one song weekly for a year.
I wrote 88 songs in 2024 while working 10 hour days in an office. I wanted to learn as much as I could and reached a crossroads in my life where I either had time to learn (consume) or I had time to make (create). Between working a full time job, pouring into my marriage, maintaining a home, and curating any remnant of a social life, I opted to forgo my education plans at YouTube university to deep dive into music theory, do vocal warm ups every day, or master the art of production for a more kinesthetic kindergartener approach: just make the art. No grade, no feedback, no expectation - a pass or fail of whether I spent time being creative was all I sought out.
Historically, I’ve been anti-productivity just for the sake of having a product, since I’ve witnessed that mentality to be the death of passion in many creatives. In my case, however, I found that a goal of a song a week gave me an excuse to write a draft without overthinking or editing as I went along. It taught me there is no final product draft without a first draft. Rather than cringing at a first draft and hurrying forward, spending time looking at a pile of words attentively taught me to sift out the grit and dirt to see if there was any nugget of something more valuable mixed in it. Eventually, I got better (and am still improving on) sifting more efficiently, recognizing signs of gold, and knowing where to mine in the first place.
This project was delayed and paused by weeks of travel, a month of pneumonia, and the usual brake checks of life, but I have every intention of creating weekly and for so much longer than a year. I accomplished what I set out to: create a habit of creating. I sharpened tools I didn’t know I had in music production, lyricism, and vocals, and acquired new ones in skills like video editing and coming up with chord progressions and fun bass lines. The project will continue, but for the time being I can create a lot more music when I don’t have the added weekly hours of editing and posting on all the social media formats known to man. Maybe I’ll have more time to post more live versions of them down the line, but for now, I’m headed back to my home studio to write to my heart’s content.