Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] Speaker A: Hey, Aaron. We're still here in Rockport, Massachusetts, I believe. I'm tired of sitting down.
[00:00:17] Speaker B: Well, after this introduction, you can get up.
[00:00:20] Speaker A: Okay, good. We can drive home, can't we?
[00:00:23] Speaker B: We can.
[00:00:24] Speaker A: Okay. Well, we're here to show you part two of our interview with Burr Settles.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Founder of February album writing month, and.
[00:00:33] Speaker A: On one of the founding teams of Duolingo, which has again rocked our world and continues to do so. I wouldn't know how to say smoothie o, which is ironing in Welsh, if it wasn't for Br.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: That is ironic, isn't it?
[00:00:47] Speaker A: Yeah. So it's amazing how entrepreneurs are also creative people, and when those two things get married, they create some amazing things in our world. And he talks a little bit more about technology, his music side versus his non music side, some of his other projects which go away from the language learning side and going into the helping musicians do what we do.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: And in this part of the conversation, Bertox, about the silliness that is inherent in the songwriting challenges of February album writing month. And he shows us an example of one of his own songs that was created in a very silly manner. And you're going to have to listen to this episode to hear exactly how that was done.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: We didn't share a song at the last one, so please stick around. Listen to this song. It's really neat. It's got a. It's got kind of a late nineties, early two thousands vibe just listening to it, and so we think you'll really enjoy it.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: All right, here's Burr settles.
Burr, can you think of the most interesting journeys that a Phomsong has had? And I could think of one, but go ahead. And, I mean, any of them got professional record that sold 100,000 copies or something?
[00:02:12] Speaker C: I mean, I don't know about the 100,000 copies, you know, benchmark, but the phom community is made up of all types of different songwriters with all kinds of different ambitions. So, yeah, there have been phom songs that have been placed in tv commercials and movie soundtracks. There have been phom songs that were not intended to be released, but were posted on, you know, like on. On Soundcloud or Bandcamp or something, that were accidentally chosen by Jimmy Fallon for his do not playlist segment.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: I mean, I remember that.
[00:02:42] Speaker C: Yeah, during fam, if you're taking goal of 14 songs in 28 days, seriously, you just have to embrace the fact that you're gonna have two or three, maybe four good songs, two or three or four really bad songs, and then everything else in, like, some gray zone of salvageability in between mushy middle.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:05] Speaker C: And so you learn to be okay with getting the. The bad songs out of your system so that you can move on.
[00:03:13] Speaker B: Oh, God. Yeah.
[00:03:14] Speaker C: And there was one of those songs that a particular falmer, me and my friend. Yeah. They wrote a throwaway song. I think it was for skirmish. It was like somebody gave a title, and he pumped something out in an hour and posted it. And then somebody on Jimmy Fallon's team took that posting as, like, a serious release, and they decided to include it and play it on national tv and make fun of it.
[00:03:37] Speaker A: Was he the only one or. Because I have a friend who had one that made that list also.
[00:03:42] Speaker C: Maybe it's happened multiple times. I only know of one incident, but.
[00:03:45] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a didgeridoo player that I know that had a song.
[00:03:49] Speaker C: Oh, oh, not a farmer. The didgeridoo player.
[00:03:51] Speaker B: No, I don't think that the didgeridoo, if we're thinking about the same one.
[00:03:55] Speaker A: My friend Pitts quattrone used it as a social media moment and really promoted the heck out of his song. He's like, well, I made the worst, you know, do not play list. He's like, check it out, everyone. And it was. He used it as kind of a proud moment. So it was, you know, because his songs are funny like that.
[00:04:12] Speaker B: So, Burr, I mean, how. How did it make you feel when Jimmy Fallon's team did that? And did you get involved at all?
[00:04:19] Speaker C: By the time I found out about it, it was sort of a newspaper article had been written about it. Jimmy Fallon had taken down that segment from YouTube, and as far as I know, they didn't issue an apology, but they sort of removed all evidence of it, and the dust had settled by the time I even found out about it. But, I mean, I felt bad that. But, I mean, it's also, like, it's not my fault or anything, right? I felt bad that it happened. On the other hand, there have been lots of phone songs, similarly goofy songs. Like, I think Errol and I want to say PFE are two members of the phone community who collaborated on a song that was literally, the lyrics were just the commands that you go through to win the video game Zork, the text based video game Zork.
And that became a huge underground hit in the Zork fan community. And on the 20th anniversary of Zork, or 25th or whatever year it was, newspaper articles about Zork were coming out and mentioning this song as an example. Maybe one of the highest profile Phom project examples was in, I think, 2006. There were three friends out in the Bay Area who, one of them was a history professor in the UC system and said, you know, I think I'm gonna write, or one of them, I don't know the exact story, but one of them, they were out for drinks. They were talking about Fong coming up, and one of them said, I'm gonna write songs about all presidents. And then one of the others said, that sounds cool. I'll do that with you. And then they realized that if each of them did 14 phone songs and there were three of them three times, 14 is 42, and there had been 42 presidents at that point in history in 2006. So they each round robin picked off a different president, and they all wrote songs to the entire, entire slate of us presidencies. And then that project got picked up by a label and they re recorded it and then released it during the 2008, oh, man, presidential election season. And that got, you know, all kinds of critical acclaim. And I don't think they've kept up with writing new songs for the three presidents we've had since then. But it was a cool project. I just get warm fuzzies just thinking that I was somehow tangentially involved in making these things happen.
[00:06:29] Speaker B: Well, you know that in 2007, that first year, we as a family were going through a medical issue. And so I was spending some time at the hospital, just needing to pass the time. And I remember just like, writing the US Senate song, naming all hundred senators in one song.
[00:06:49] Speaker C: That's right. You have a political. Senator McCain is one of.
[00:06:53] Speaker B: I did. That wasn't Phaum.
[00:06:54] Speaker C: Yeah, maybe that was before you got involved with Phaum. I remember we have to have met in person. Cause I have a memory of seeing you play that song live somewhere.
[00:07:03] Speaker B: Okay, well, yeah, it's.
I suppose that's a memorable song. But that was during that period that I was writing songs about politicians before I realized really what I was trying to do was write songs about real people. But I digress. How does it feel to have ushered aloud so many songs into the world?
[00:07:22] Speaker C: Yeah, it's a funny feeling. Cause I can't even wrap my head around it and I've kinda stopped trying. And it can be even a little bit embarrassing to meet falmers who, like, I don't know their name. I can't remember ever hearing any of their phalm songs. Cause there's been like a quarter million phalm songs written over the last couple of decades. But at this point, I think of myself as a steward of this thing. Yeah. Similarly, I can't wrap my head around, you know, how many millions of people around the world are learning on Duolingo and what they're learning and what that can afford them in their daily lives.
[00:07:55] Speaker A: You wouldn't want to wrap your head around it probably because it's just so, so big. And I think just the fact that they're both good things that are out in the world by way of technology, it's just proves that there's good things humans are doing with the tools that we have. So I guess you can try, but it sounds bigger than life to even attempt.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: So you've gone viral twice with, with two completely different projects.
[00:08:18] Speaker C: You know, one of my, one of my greatest joys or something I can say is, so growing up, jeopardy. Was my favorite game show. I kind of sort of watched wheel of fortune, but I pretty regularly tried to watch Jeopardy. I was never interested in trying to be a contestant on jeopardy, although I had family members who did go out for it, but I always watched it. And both Phaum and Duolingo had made appearances in jeopardy.
[00:08:42] Speaker B: Really?
[00:08:42] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: So Faun has been on jeopardy.
[00:08:45] Speaker C: It wasn't a clue or, like, one of the questions, but there was a falmer, Christopher Short, who goes by the handle Menba, who had a run of at least a week as jeopardy. Champion. And it just so happened that the very first episode that he was in, you know, they do that getting to know you question. Alex Trebek asked him about what is February album writing month? And so Chris got to talk about it.
[00:09:11] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:09:12] Speaker C: And that was a joy. And then Duolingo has showed up at least twice as a clue, once as an answer, and then another as part of the clue.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: You know, I've got a little bit off, you know, maybe a little bit of an outlier of a question, but one of the musicians I work with, you might know the name, and he's an accordion player. His name is Sergei Nierenberg. He's involved with cognitive science, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and has published a lot of books since he came to the states in the eighties, I believe. So he's an amazing musician. And I was curious if that rings a bell, because you're published, you know, with your research, and I'm curious when you're doing something like Duolingo or, like, you know, he was telling me that it's language translation is not necessarily, like, there's the academic side and then there's the practical side. But I was curious, like, where your education and knowledge of other scholarly works meet up. Because I don't necessarily read a lot of scholarly music articles, but my friend Ken has a PhD in music composition, and he loves reading scholarly articles. So I wonder where you sit there. And I was curious if you had heard of Sergei Nierenberg. He teaches in Troy. He's the head of department at the university there at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. RPI.
[00:10:27] Speaker C: RPI, right. Actually, I think my undergrad advisor went to RPI. Actually, I wonder if he was my undergrad advisor's advisor. The name rings a bell. I couldn't point to a particular published article or body of work of his that I'm familiar with, and I don't know if I've met him in person, but the name is familiar. I mean, to your question about the academic side of things, musically, I have almost no academic training or background. I never even took. I just started taking bass lessons six months ago, and that's the first set of music lessons I've ever taken in my life. Everything else was entirely kind of intuitive and self taught to. I have been getting more interested in self teaching music theory because I'm interested in using computers and technology and artificial intelligence to create tools to help people create music, not as a push button solution to hear write me a song. I think that's boring, even if it can be good, I just think it's kind of boring. But the same way that having a collaborator or a co writer or something like will throw out ideas at you that you wouldn't necessarily think of. I'm interested in developing algorithms to help spawn constraints, but things that we interpret as musically valid and not just a string of random notes or stuff. So I've been reading more academic stuff in that realm. But even part of the reason I left academia, because I had the opportunity to follow a faculty career path, and I decided to abandon that and go to Duolingo, which at the time was just a startup. We had no idea it would grow into what it has grown into, but part of that was I was just fundamentally more interested in building real things that people would use and not just publishing papers. I love publishing papers. I love telling a story about, you know, something that you've tried to invent or something that you've tried to wrap your head around and get to the bottom of and sharing that with the scholarly community. But at the end of the day, I'm more motivated by making something that people can use and have fun with. So, yeah, I've pivoted a lot of my research interest away from language and language learning and into music and music creation, although nobody's seen the fruits of that yet because it's still very, you know, behind the scenes and, like, stuff that I'm doing basically. I haven't had any successes yet either, so there's nothing to, like, really release.
[00:12:46] Speaker A: How do you split, like, your technology brain with your music brain? Because what I have noticed, like, musicians go, we're going to do this album and we're going to sell a lot of these. That's our goal. And you just aim for the stars, the universe, maybe the entire, you know, celestial sphere. And then if you get maybe one slug or two slugs or maybe a flower, that's pretty, you know, who knows? You get a little bit and you're like, yes, we succeeded, right? You know, and the toured musician's motto is like, well, if we, if we come out even, we succeeded. If we lose money, we, that's, that's still kind of a success, you know. But I noticed, like, with, with startups, you know, you might, I'm guessing you might try 50 different ideas, and then if something sticks, you keep going with it. If it doesn't, you have the audacity to move on, which I don't have the audacity to move on half the time as a musician brain. So I almost compare it to, like, the recording engineer brain versus the performing musician brain. When I'm doing both, I have to jump between the two, and it's a weird balance. And I'm just curious, do you think of it that way? Any of these projects you're working on, is it more like you put it into the test world, and if it doesn't work, or are you waiting to put it out there in the way that you envision it first? Like, how does that work?
[00:13:58] Speaker C: Yeah, everything always evolves once you get experience with anything, you know, whether it's making music or building an app or whatever, once you get going with it, there are things you learn, there are things you thought would work that turns out they don't, or just the way you tried it won't work. And so you either try again a different way or decide to just follow the path that it's already on, and that's just a different path. I think there was a quote, I might be misremembering this quote, but I read somewhere that the Wall street investor Peter Drucker, I think was his name, once told Jim Collins, who is a business researcher. Peter Drucker once said, you can either work on great ideas or work on great companies, but you can't have both. And so I think kind of what my answer to your question is is what's your driving force? Like, if you're, let's say you're a band and you're making an album, and if your goal is to be the biggest band in the world, the way you approach that might be different than if your goal is to make an artistic statement. And they don't have to be mutually exclusive. Like, you can make an artistic statement and that resonates with a ton of people and it becomes huge. So I'm not saying that they have to be mutually exclusive, but you can't really pursue both at the same time. And ultimately, Duolingo was trying to be a great company. And part of the reason I decided to leave was because it grew to the point where it was kind of hard for me to pursue my intellectual ideas, you know, that were relevant to the business. And so with Phom, I think more of my headspace is focused on, there are certainly things we could do with Phom to make it go viral and be big, or try that. To try to be the go to place a household name for making music and have the website up twelve months of the year instead of just one month in February and then three months in the summer for the 50 90 version of it. I think my focus is on just helping people develop a rhythm of creative output, and it might be successful in a business or capitalistic sense. And, you know, hopefully it is to the extent that it needs to be, to be sustainable, but the focus is more on, you know, building community and inspiring people to be creative.
[00:16:20] Speaker B: Wow. Well said.
[00:16:22] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, Aaron, I think we've hit about an hour, and burr, you've been so generous with your time, and.
[00:16:27] Speaker B: Thank you, Burr.
[00:16:28] Speaker A: Thank you. Yeah.
[00:16:28] Speaker B: So I want to leave us with a song that Burr wrote. Love out loud. Can you tell us a little bit about. Because there are so many creative challenges on faum to help people reach 14 songs, what was the creative challenge that led to this song?
[00:16:43] Speaker C: So we were talking about comments earlier and the nature of comments, and there was this year a new thing that just happened in Phaum 2024. I believe the idea started with Wabi Wabbit, who is a singer songwriter in London. It was some informal zoom get together of famers where she said, you know, we should do a comments first thing where you just, like, post a song and there's no song yet, and people leave comments on this non existent song, and then you have to go back and write that song. And then somebody posted that as a challenge in the forums. And I thought it was a brilliant idea. So I gave it a shot and I loved it and I kept doing it. And I wrote like five or six songs using this approach. And another thing that I used to do pretty regularly is for Valentine's Day, I would write a song for my wife during film. And then during that decade or so where I wasn't really doing film, I kind of got out of the habit of doing that. And even after I came back, I kind of wasn't in the habit. So I was like, I'm going to write her a love song for Valentine's Day. And I decided to post it as a comments first challenge. So then I posted that and I just pulled up here the comments that were left. I said, this is a comments first challenge and it's going to be a love song for my wife. So keep that in mind when you leave your prompts.
[00:18:02] Speaker B: Now, did you have the title yet?
[00:18:04] Speaker C: I did not.
[00:18:05] Speaker B: So just love song discuss.
[00:18:07] Speaker C: Yeah, it was a love song for my wife for Valentine's Day. That was it. And then there's a comment from Nancy Rost, mutual friend from Madison, who says, I like the callback to answers Come, which that was a song that I wrote for her back in like Phaum 2006 or seven. And then Mike Gutierrez me said, you and your wife are very well matched. Two hearts beating is one. So I think I, I maybe tried to pull that as a lyrical idea. And then I think adding the harp was a really nice touch. A little touch of Cupid, the bridge of love, and then somebody else. So sweet. I always enjoy your delicate ukulele playing, and I like how the parts where you have only the Yuk and the vocals match the more vulnerable parts of the lyrics.
[00:18:52] Speaker B: Oh, boy.
[00:18:53] Speaker C: Mike Sklier from New York says, I love how you introduced the original recipe for chocolate heart candies pass down from the 17th century.
[00:19:01] Speaker B: Wow, that's very specific.
[00:19:02] Speaker C: And then finally, counting the number of bridges you crossed before finding her was a magical touch. That's a callback to. I have this habit when I visit cities to try and do an urban hike of all the bridges of that city. It's an oil arian path. Oil Arian. That's a topic for a whole other podcast. But so that's what I had to work with.
So I sat down, took me basically all day. I ended up ditching the candy hearts altogether, but the rest of them I managed to weave into this song to some degree. And I've been doing a lot of playing around with mixing synthesizers and drum machines, along with acoustic instruments and stuff. So I think this song ended up, you know, pulling that off in some tasteful way, hopefully.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: All right, well, you mentioned some of the friends that I've made through faum, and, of course, my. My friendship, my dear friendship with Nancy Ross predates Faum, right? I think she was the one who got me hooked.
[00:19:56] Speaker C: Probably got you into it. Yeah.
[00:19:58] Speaker B: Yeah. So, Nancy, if you're listening, come on this podcast.
We'll talk to you.
[00:20:04] Speaker A: Yes, please do. Please do so.
[00:20:07] Speaker B: Okay, Bursettles, thank you for joining us, and God bless you for creating this amazing community.
[00:20:15] Speaker C: Yes, well, thank you very much for having me. And, yeah, I'm glad it's been a part of both of your lives.
[00:20:22] Speaker B: So here is Bursettles love out loud.
[00:20:32] Speaker D: I love when you get weird, spontaneous dance break. For reasons unclear, things can be done over but rarely overdone.
When we do as one does as.
[00:20:53] Speaker C: One.
[00:20:56] Speaker D: Babies smell like banter and taste of something smart our time is measured by the beating of our hearts and I've lost count of every bridge that I span just to kneel where you stand we live out loud boys but not proud with our head in the cloud sometimes we love out loud it's quiet we found it's everything I hope to find I love you for all that you are and for all you'll become and for all the questions posed by love's lessons I can feel the answers come we live out loud poised but not proud with our head of the cloud sometime we love out loud in this quiet we found it's everything I hope to feel I love that we can speak with ease and hear each other through parentheses we're flying blind to what we're headed toward but life is a trip and we are both on board we live out loud poised but not proud with our head in a cloud we love out loud it is quietly found it's everything I hope to find we live out loud poised but not proud with our head in the cloud sometimes we love out loud in this quiet we found it's everything I hope to find.
[00:24:17] Speaker B: So that's our interview with Burr settles.
[00:24:19] Speaker A: That was good.
[00:24:20] Speaker B: It was good.
[00:24:21] Speaker A: We have more wonderful people coming your way. But until then, we hope that your day is the best day that it can can be. And we're just honored that you would spend it with us.
[00:24:31] Speaker B: Thanks, everybody. Peace.
[00:24:33] Speaker A: Bye.
