FAWMonos!

How I Plan to Write a Whole Album This Month, and Why You Should Too

I'm going to go way out on a limb this February, and undertake an impossible project. I've tried to do this before and failed miserably; but this time it's going to be different. This time, my failure is going to be publicly smeared all over the internet for the whole world to laugh at.

This February, I'm going to write and record a 14-song album. In a month. One song every two days.

Check out this website: http://fawm.org


TL;DR for the FAWM website: February Album Writing Month ("FAWM") is similar to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo); it's a "crap art" endeavor that involves churning out a large amount of material in a short amount of time. The goal is to write 14 songs in the month of February; recording is a secondary goal, but highly encouraged. The idea here is to start writing on February first, and churn out a song every 2 days until you have 14 demos at the end of the month.

This is a highly ambitious program, and that's why I like it. It goes without saying that most FAWM attempts are going to end in failure, even with collaborators and a high level of motivation. That doesn't matter. The very concept of "winning" or "losing" FAWM is a strange one, since the only prize for "winning" is the 14 songs you've written, and there are no consequences for "losing;"  artists keep the rights to all the music they create, so even if you only write 4 or 5 songs in the month, you're still 4 or 5 songs richer than when you started.

A lot of people are intimidated by the notion of creating things. That's why I like projects like these - National Novel Writing Month, where you write a whole novel in November; FAWM and the RPM Challenge where you write a whole album in February; National Poem Writing Month, where you write a poem every day for the whole month of April; and dozens of others... The emphasis isn't on creating the greatest art ever made by a living mortal; it's about making a thing and just getting it out there, which is really all the "professionals" are doing - we just spend a lot of time tweaking and editing things after the first drafts are done. These are events that break down the barrier between professional and amateur by uniting us under the banner of Striving to Create! and that can only be a good thing.

I'll be posting my efforts to this blog; check back in on even-numbered days of February for updates on my rousing successes or despicable failures. I'll be posting rough cuts of the tunes here and on SoundCloud if anybody is interested in them.


FAWMonos, baby. It's game time.

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