Tuesday, November 2, 2010

21 Songs in Twenty-One Days

In November every year thousands of writers take on writing for a month and entering their work in a competition. NaNoWriMo is a non-profit group that hosts a contest every year in November for novel writers to test their skill against other novel writers. Unfortunately, I am not a novel writer and therefore will not be entering said contest. However, I am a writer.

I used to have this friend named Leroy (some names may have been changed to protect the innocent.) Leroy and I played music together in college a bit, and then both ended up in Seattle and found ourselves making music together on a fairly regular basis. At the time (2002, ouch I'm really dating myself now) I was living with him and some other friends at this house in Fremont affectionately named, the Pink House. Leroy and I lived in the back part of the Pink House and often went upstairs to make music for our friends who lived there.

Sometime in the beginning of November '02, Leroy asked me if I had heard that it was national writers month. I had not, and told him so. He went on to explain the contest and that it was not something we could do, but he had an idea of his own. Leroy wanted to write a song every day for 21 days, and each day perform what we had written. I thought two things: 1. why 21 days? and 2. I never have 21 days in a row I can commit to writing a whole song.

Well Jonn...I mean Leroy, convinced me to try this project out and away we went. Now, I can't say that we actually wrote a song a day for all 21 days, but at least 12 songs came out of that project for me. In fact, you can hear one I recorded with Blake Lewis (then Bshorty) on my myspace account: Nate b Music Check out the song, "I Said It All." Blake did all the production, I did the guitar and vocals.

Now, this is not the best music I've ever written, but it was an awesome exercise in writing and pushing myself to overcome writers block. I really only bring this up because Annie and I are working on our new album, "Songs We Wrote for Something Else" by writing for all sorts of other projects. Namely, the Bushwick Book Club.

So, whenever I get super down about the song writing juices, I remember pushing out those tunes day of and barely making it. Even if, "The Stalker Song" always got more credit then all the songs I wrote.

Miss you Jonny...ooops! I mean, Leroy.

Nate b
Bucket of Honey

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