On Writing an Album in a Month (kinda)

I’ve read Jeff Tweedy’s How to Write One Song at least half a dozen times over the last couple of years. It’s a quick read, super practical, and I love the way he fights against the mysticism of creative practice. He argues that waiting for inspiration to strike is folly, that instead you can invite inspiration through intentional routines. You can choose to be creative through purposeful practice. I love the message, and I really thought that I understood the lesson, but it took the nonstop grind of February Album Writing Month (FAWM) for me to really internalize it. By forcing myself to work at a songwriting cadence more aggressive than I’d ever tried, I had no choice but to actually make the creative output happen, and once I broke through that barrier the songs just started flooding out.

When you are staring down a deadline of fourteen songs in twenty-eight days, you simply do not have the luxury of waiting to feel inspired. It’s intimidating enough that despite knowing about FAWM for years, this was the first time I’ve had the gumption to actually give it a go. I actually set my personal goal at ten songs, figuring if I could get that done this year, maybe next year I’d make it through the full fourteen. I never thought I’d find myself tossing aside mostly-finished songs because they just weren’t moving fast enough to cross the finish line. There was no time to get precious about the music, nor was there time to labor over the production of demos. I’ve always struggled to kill my darlings, but moving at a clip meant making brutal decisions quickly to avoid being stuck for a whole day on a song that wasn’t ready to come out.

I leaned on both technology and songwriting strategies to get songs moving when I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired. I wandered through chordal relationships in Scaler until I discovered changes that matched the feeling in my chest. I diligently followed daily object writing guidance from Pat Pattison’s Writing Better Lyrics , and then I dumped all that object writing into NotebookLM where I could sift through and find surprising rhymes and rhythmic parallels across a month’s worth of disorganized thoughts. I always love the songs that flow out of me like a tap, but the ones that came through purposeful effort were something special. They were more surprising, and pushed at the bounds of what I would typically do. I realized that the music I’m naturally inspired to make comes from a place of comfort and familiarity, but the music that I find when I’m not inspired pushes me to grow. I don’t think one is inherently better than the other, but I certainly value the “forced” creativity now more than I did before.

I came into the month with high-minded ideals about joining a vibrant community of artists struggling together against the tide of time, but when the wheels hit the pavement I had to focus on my own output to build and preserve momentum. I used the community to keep driving forward even though I did very little to reciprocate, and I realized that the shared space was acting as the structural scaffolding I needed to survive the sprint. The progress bar at the top of the page kept me focused on my output (there’s something to say there about gamification, but that’s for another time). Comments on my tracks validated my writing (and confirmed that my pitchy vocals weren’t so bad that the songs were unlistenable). I think a lot of the magic that makes FAWM work is in the community, and that makes me want to become a more engaged member next time, now that I’ve got my feet under me.

I could go on for a while about everything I learned from participating in FAWM, but the one major takeaway for me is the incredible value of public accountability to my own creative output. I don’t mean accountability with judgment or teeth, but rather a shared commitment with strangers who want to see me succeed as much as I want to see them succeed. I learned that I can make things, share them, and feel genuinely good about it. It is exactly that feeling of urgency through accountability that inspired me to set up this site and get writing again in the first place.

In the interest of giving myself even more public accountability to create, I have set up Tideflats to make sure I actually finish producing some of those demos I recorded and properly publish them. I have seen some people release their full album of FAWM songs every year, but I am setting my sights on a 4-5 song EP this year to keep things realistic. Baby steps. This is me speaking that intention into the world now. I’ve bought the domain, I’ve picked the songs, and I am trusting that I can do this simply because I just said I would.