Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Hello. This is the Nathanson Roncast, a podcast about the songcraft and musicianship behind the songs we love. I'm Aaron Nathans. Anyone who has heard me play has probably heard me speak the words February album writing month on more than one occasion. Most of my songs, not all of them, but most of them, have been written during the month of February, when there isn't much to do outside, and when the sun sets well before dinnertime.
[00:00:37] What is February album writing month? Fashioned after national Novel Writing Month, it's a challenge to write 14 songs in the 28 days of the shortest month of the year. You upload the words and music to their website, and your fellow songwriters from around the world cheer you on as they work on their own songs, and you return the favor by listening to a ton of their new music.
[00:01:00] February album Writing Month, or Faum for short, was created in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2004 while I was living there, and I have some vague memories of friends telling me about it, but at the time I had no use for it. I was a new songwriter, regularly writing all year long and loving the creative life. It wasn't until I had moved to Delaware a few years later and after the birth of my first child that I decided to give it a go.
[00:01:27] At the time, I found Faum useful because I had just left behind my musical community in Madison and didn't have much of a community yet in the Delaware or Philadelphia area. A lot of my Madison friends were doing faum, and it was a good way to keep in touch. It was something I could do on my own time to take my mind off of the challenges of new parenthood, or better yet, to turn those challenges into art. Faum encourages people to be silly and irreverent, and in that first year, I wrote a song that named all 100 United States senators, which I still consider to be one of my greatest musical achievements. My favorite line was, I am Barbara Boxer. Though my story seldom told, as the years went by, I made it a habit, almost a religious one, to write 14 songs in the month of February. To quote Yoda, there was no try and there was no excuse. No matter how hard life got in any given year, it was just something I did. When the calendar turned to that second month, I made some good friends and got a lot of good songs out of it. And I got a lot of really mediocre songs out of it, too. So many, in fact, that every year I tended to do a cost benefit analysis of the effort I put in versus the song output I got out and the result every year tended to be two or three keepers, with the first or second song typically among them. Since I had so much time leading up to that first song to do the underlying research, two of my own favorite songs, the strength to not fight back, and old film. I started writing within an hour of each other in the minutes after midnight one year. The quality tends to go down from there, but there would always be that one quirky keeper that I wasn't expecting late in the month, one that I never would have written if if I hadn't been wailing away at it.
[00:03:10] And then there's the unfortunate truth that I was so tired of writing at the end of the month that I often ended up not writing much for the rest of the year. I hold a monthly song critique group, and it's far too easy to just bring one more song left over from faum than it is to write something new. The songs in February tended to be a little clever, and I don't mean that in a good way, because clever can be a crutch when it's not attached to a deeper meaning that forms the backbone of a good song.
[00:03:38] But there's another reason I do February is filled with dark days and a bleak outlook on life. February album writing month gives me something to focus on, a source of hope and the knowledge that the future is being written right now, to be harvested later when the sun is higher in the sky. It takes your mind off your troubles or allows you to make art from them. Maybe that song will never go anywhere or ever be played again. But you took those brooding thoughts and processed them, made something of them. And your phomm friends commented saying, I see you, you feel heard, and you have the chance to pay it forward.
[00:04:13] So yes, I continue to do February album writing month, even as I recognize that I'm not actually writing an album that month. On years that I'm actively working to finish releasing an album, then I scale back. I only do a few songs that month because my mind has something else to focus on. But I know that the following year I'll be right back at it. And I have to remember that I need to write during the rest of the year, too, because February album writing month is no substitute for writing regularly. Songwriters write. For more information, go to faum.org fawm.org dot next week, we'll bring you part one of our interview with Burr Settles, the founder of February Album Writing Month. It's a great conversation. We'll talk with you soon. Peace.
