I Hate Mornings

I was in a quandary. I had less than two weeks left in the 50/90 Song Challenge, and 30 songs left to write. Times were tough. I needed a short cut, but I couldn’t bring myself to cheat. So I did something in between…

Limitations are your friend

Creative people often talk about the benefits of boundaries and limitations to your creativity. No designer will start a project without a well defined brief. A blank sheet of paper is a useless way to start writing. That’s one of the reasons why I took on the 50/90 Challenge in the first place.

I really enjoyed writing the 12seconds.tv song, and it got a good reception when I played it at the Oxford Geek Night. A 12-second song has to rely on humour, simplicity, clarity and great words. And when you need to write loads of songs quickly it’s a godsend!

A micro-songwriting process

I only had about 4 hours to write, film and upload 12 songs, so I had to be brutally pragmatic. Armed with a 10×10″ sketch pad, a Moleskine full of title ideas and a 2B pencil, I set to work.

I have had a title suggestion form on my website for a few weeks, so I had about 30 potential titles copied into the notebook along with ideas I have captured in the wild. It’s always useful to have starting points on hand when you’re pressed for time.

Because my mind works best with systems and structures I divided a page of the sketchbook neatly into 16 equal squares, room for 12 tiny songs and 4 bad ideas. That way I could afford to spew out ideas quickly safe in the knowledge that the crap ones wouldn’t make the cut. It’s never good to be worrying about the final quality when you’re trying to create. Nothing’s good until you make it good.

It didn’t take long to fill the grid with lyrics. Some came from the title book, some were picked out of the air. 4 of them were crap. ;o)

12seconds.tv

I recorded a song in iMovie, exported it as a MOV, uploaded it to 12seconds.tv, and recorded the next one. The music was made up on the spot – I would work out a good setting for a particular line, record it and move on. The whole recording process took about 90 minutes, by which time I had an entire 144-second album online. A couple of people were even watching the videos go up as they were recorded!

YouTube

That was almost a week ago, and although they have been online for a while (and viewable in the 12seconds.tv widget on my website) I know more people will see them if they are on YouTube (especially after the Twitter song shenanigans;o). So today I edited them all together into a 2″54′ video and uploaded it to YouTube.

And here it is – the shortest album I’ve ever made!

Thanks for the titles!

• Kenneth Okumura for “Zipper flies make me cry” (via Facebook)
• Lloyd Davis for inspiring “Mr Ukelele”
• Greg Lucas for cowriting “Walking down the middle of the road” in the late 90s
• Nick Gill for inspiring “Saw”
• Laurie Nevay for “Oranges or Carrots”
• Anna Speddy for “Not My Forte”
• Ellie’s boyfriend Steve for “Virgin Trains”

The Twitter song I wrote last week has been getting some serious and much appreciated Twitter love and even a blog mention. And within a couple of days I got a message from the BBC (delivered by a mustachioed messenger on horseback) asking if I would give them an interview for the Pods and Blogs show on Radio Five Live.

Despite having a tyre explode on my Volvo I managed to dash home greasy-handed just in time to answer a Skype call from the BBC studio (I was only kidding about the horse earlier – the Beeb is pretty hi-tech these days ;o). If any of you happen to be listening to Five Live at 2am tonight, I’ll be there. I will undoubtedly be tucked up in bed, but I’m assured it will be on the podcast (and I assume the iPlayer) afterwards.

If you found my site from the radio show, hi. Be sure to subscribe to the feed or the email list, or follow me on Twitter!

Jonathan Coulton became an internet superstar by writing songs about computer games, programmers, Flickr, the internet and associated themes (mostly zombies). That’s what he cares about and that’s what his audience cares about. He’s being authentic and connecting with like minds. He doesn’t try to get the rest of the world to listen. There are always going to be enough geeks to pack out his shows.

I’ve been thinking about JoCo’s approach to online superstardom for ages, trying to figure out whether it would work for any web-savvy musician (ie. me ;o). For a while I thought it would: build a decent website where you can preview and buy songs easily, and where the audience can interact with the artist (JoCo’s fans create videos, remixes and other derivatives of his work, which he releases under a Creative Commons licence) and Bob’s your uncle.

But then I figured out the snag. Think of your target audience. If you’re like most songwriters they will be educated, tasteful young adults with cool friends who put on your music at parties and rave about you to everyone they meet. Now think of the kind of people who create fan videos. The kind of people who remix Creative Commons music and transcribe ukelele tab. The kind of people who comment on every blog post. The kind of people who even read blogs. That’s right.

h3. I’m talking about geeks.

Geeks aren’t tasteful young adults who party with their cool friends. Geeks have bizarre and obsessive tastes, bizarre and obsessive geeky friends, and they don’t have parties. If you want to be an internet superstar your audience is geeks. To some, that’s not ideal. ;o)

Lucky for me, I’m a card-carrying geek and I love writing quirky pop songs about geeky things. So I have a chance at internet superstardom. Now, if only I had a breakthrough hit song that was guaranteed to go hyperviral the second it hits the Twitterverse…

Holy cow! I just recorded a song about Twitter! I bet that would work!

h3. You’re No One If You’re Not On Twitter

It’s true. Like Twitter itself, this entire blog post has been a pathetically disguised press release for my new superviral, Twittertastic song: “You’re No One If You’re Not On Twitter”. Shame on me. It’s in the player at the top of the page – you can listen to it now, while you’re reading! Now go tweet, people. Tweet until your little beaks are sore. Then wait a few minutes and tweet again. Let’s fill the Twitterverse with glorious music. ;o)

You can tweet the link to the song page on the 50/90 Challenge website, or the link to this article. Better yet, just retweet the tweet!

Feel free to flame me or give me love in the comments.