Write Drunk, Edit Sober

This episode is all about how I made the song and what happened once it went viral.

I woke up this morning with some lyrics and a melody in my head.

SongFight.org is a weekly song competition that’s been going since the early aughts. Each week you’re given a title. You make a song with that title, email it to the "fight master", who then posts all the songs to be voted on. The song with the most votes wins. There’s no prize but the warm satisfaction of a job well done. From roughly 2003 to 2005, I participated in SongFight every single week. I rarely won, but as a precursor to song a day, I found it was a great way to keep myself accountable, to keep writing songs. Since starting Song A Day, I occasionally go back and participate in a fight...

Every once in a while, I'll put the call out on Twitter and ask people what they think I should write about. The suggestions are often about current events. Or animals. Today, I decided to go with a suggestion that's a bit more difficult to interpret.

Today's song is about all the ways we distract ourselves to avoid being alone with our thoughts and our mortality. It started when the title popped into my head.

Every once in a while, I try starting a song using an instrument I don't normally use.

In August of 2019, Iceland marked the loss of a glacier. 100 or so people, including the Prime Minsiter, walked up the mountain to hold a ceremony and install a plaque that reads , “Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done Only you know if we did it.” I saw this bit of news go by and knew immediately that I wanted to write a song about it.

There are many days when I sit down to write a song and I have no idea what I'm going to write about. This is one of those days.

There’s a quote, most often attributed to Hemingway (though no one can find where he said it): WRITE DRUNK, EDIT SOBER. In this episode, we do some "sober editing".

Every year for the last 8 years, I've turned Apple's big WWDC event into a song. This year featured a lot of (excited) swearing.