Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: This is the Nathans and Roncast, the podcast about the musicianship and songcraft behind the songs we love and Michael, where are we today?
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Today we're just outside of Rockport, Massachusetts, and we're looking at the ocean as we sit here.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: That's right. I. We're here on Whale Cove Road, home of the Whale Cove House concert series put on by our gracious hosts, Jeff and Celine Lyon. And we're going to be playing in about an hour.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: Yeah, so we figured we would do this introduction for the next big episode of our Nathan's and Ron cast. And on location is always a lot of fun since we did that at Philly folk Fest. Here's another on location with Aaron Nathans and Michael Ronstadt.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: You can hear the wind coming off the coast.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: Yeah. Take a moment.
Okay. That's your moment.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: You've heard the wind. It's done.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: So we interviewed Burr settles.
[00:01:06] Speaker A: Burr settles.
[00:01:07] Speaker B: And he's done a lot.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: Oh, my God. I mean, this guy. This guy.
Thousands and thousands of songs have entered the universe because of the work of Burr settles. He is the founder of February album writing month, fawm.org. and so not only did he do.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: That, but, well, he was in with the founding team of Duolingo, which has rocked our world in all the best ways possible, including myself.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: Michael can now speak. What? Welsh?
[00:01:42] Speaker B: I can do a little bit of Welsh, thanks to bursettles, and he often does. Yes. I speak Welsh to Aaron, whether he understands me or not. Usually he doesn't.
Sometimes I don't understand smoothie o.
That was a word of the day in our first season. That's for the inside smoothio.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:02:01] Speaker B: So. Well, you know, we want to get right into it, but we wanted to introduce you to Burr settles. And he's an amazing person and really interesting to listen to. So, without any further delay, here's part one of our interview with Burr Settles.
[00:02:20] Speaker A: Burr, we're here today to talk about the phenomenon that is February album writing month, which I know has made a huge impact on my life. And so many of the songs that I play are songs that I wrote in February. Where did the idea come from?
[00:02:38] Speaker C: Well, first of all, it wasn't intended to become, like, an annual regular thing. Initially, I was a graduate student in Madison, Wisconsin, and my wife, after finishing her MFA, had the opportunity to go work at the Smithsonian for a while. So I took a leave of absence from school, had a little more free time, so to speak. I mean, I was working full time, but November of 2003 was part of that. And I decided to do national Novel writing Month, or NaNowriMo.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: Nanowrimo.
[00:03:07] Speaker C: I remember in November of 2003, and I wrote a very silly novella that nobody, including myself, has ever reread.
But at the end of that, I felt like, wow, I really accomplished something. I really accomplished this thing. And I was like, but I'm not a novelist or whatever. I'm a songwriter. There should be something like this for music. And I looked and I looked, and I couldn't find anything. And there was a musician from Alaska named Matt Hopper who we had become kind of Internet friends, as you do. We found each other on mp3.com, if you remember that.
[00:03:41] Speaker B: I remember that.
[00:03:42] Speaker C: And so we were just chatting, and we were like, well, what? Let's just do it. Let's just do our own songwriting thing for a month. And so we went back and forth, picked February, because I was moving back to Madison in January, and he was moving to LA in January. So we just arbitrarily picked February. We kind of arbitrarily picked 14 songs for 28 days, roped in a couple of other friends. And since we were all in different time zones, I created a multi author blog where we could all log in and post our songs.
And that was it. We were just going to do it the one year, but then that was 2004, but over the course of the rest of 2004, and this is before Facebook, maybe it was a thing, but maybe you still had to be at one of ten schools to have an account or something. It was before Twitter, but, I mean, friendster and MySpace were a thing, but the Internet was very different. And so people looking for music communities just stumbled across this blog, I think, and then sent me a personal email that was like, hey, can I do this next year? And I got several of those. So then I bought the faum.org domain name because it was available, and Faum stands for February album writing month. I don't know if we established that already, but, yeah, so that's where it came from, and it's been a concern ever since.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: Wow. Was our friend Nancy rost one of those first few people?
[00:05:02] Speaker C: She was early. I don't remember exactly when she started. I want to say 2006 was her first year.
[00:05:08] Speaker A: I see.
[00:05:09] Speaker C: Yeah. And she was part of the Madison songwriters group with you. And then there were a lot of early farmers who came out of the Madison, Wisconsin music scene.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: But that first year, were you the only Madisonian?
[00:05:20] Speaker C: Yeah, that first year I was in Madison, Eric distad was in the Twin Cities, and he still does it every year. Matt Hopper did it for a few years, but hasn't really been active for a long time in the fallen scene. And then I willis fireball. He was in Fairbanks, Alaska. I think he's like in Arizona or something now, but he's also done it every year.
[00:05:41] Speaker B: That's a good name right there.
[00:05:43] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:05:43] Speaker B: He's got one of those names where you go, well, I gotta go listen to that now for our listeners and a little bit for me. Aaron and Burr, did you meet in person ever on stage in Madison?
[00:05:54] Speaker A: Apparently we did. My only memory of Burr, cause this was a long time ago, was that I was at Mother Fool's coffee house. And at this point it might have been, maybe it was 2003, 2004. And I remember hearing some music on the overhead system and remember liking it. And I went and picked up the cd that was sitting next to it, and it was sketches by Burr settles. And I thought, oh boy, I hope someday I could play like Burr settles.
So what do you remember?
[00:06:29] Speaker C: That's a very flattering story. I don't know if it's true, but I appreciate it's true.
Yeah, I vaguely remember. Yeah. Mother fools. I wonder if that place is still.
[00:06:38] Speaker A: I think it is.
[00:06:39] Speaker C: Hopefully. Yeah, hopefully it's still open.
[00:06:42] Speaker A: Somebody drove a car into their wall a couple of years back, but I.
[00:06:45] Speaker C: Think, oh yeah, they rebuilt. I think somebody back in Madison told me about that.
[00:06:50] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:06:51] Speaker C: I have a memory of meeting you at some sort of phone get together. I don't know if it was like we would try to organize these local faum songwriter showcases after February or faum over parties, fops. And I feel like it was at one of those. Maybe in 2000, it would have had to have been 2007 or eight, because I think that's. You started doing it in seven or eight. And I moved here to Pittsburgh in 2009, so must have been in that brief window.
[00:07:20] Speaker A: Yeah. I moved to Delaware from Madison in 2006, but I did come back a few times, so it might have been on one of those trips.
[00:07:28] Speaker C: I could also be hallucinating that we've ever met. I don't know.
[00:07:31] Speaker A: It was a small town. It's still pretty small, but, you know. So once I arrived in Delaware, I remember I was looking for gigs, and I found something of a cattle call down in Bethany beach, and I was waiting my turn to play. And some of my best friends in this area I met that night. And I remember hearing laurie sitro playdehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe and after she was done playing, I complimented her and I said, have you ever heard of February album writing month? And it was something that I had just started doing to keep in touch with my friends in madison. That it was something I heard about while I was in town. I kind of sort of did it unofficially in, I want to say 2006, but didn't actually log in. I just challenged myself privately and got maybe three songs in and gave up. I still remember that song that I wrote that year. But that conversation with lori, I think, was the virus that infected much of the mid atlantic because she started with a passion and she told a bunch of people about it. And next thing you knew, there was a vibrant phalm community in delaware.
[00:08:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I knew that she was extremely involved in organizing farm over parties and fom stocks and things like that in delaware. So I didn't realize you were the one that got her plugged in. So that's awesome.
[00:08:50] Speaker A: Sorry.
[00:08:51] Speaker C: No, it's awesome.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: You know, Aaron's the reason I got involved in it years and years later, and my married to Serenity Fisher, she got involved with it. It's an amazing community, and it's amazing to run into, like, I think Nathan, Natrine, Michael, Natron, Michael nature.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: Sorry, not to be confused with Nathan Searles, who's also involved with Fawn, but go ahead and.
[00:09:16] Speaker B: Yeah, anyway, they have a group called the Honey Badgers, and I've played on their album now, the most recent one, I've ended up meeting people that ended up turning into recording work. And then. So many of our albums are a product of February album writing month, quite honestly. I mean, Conshohocken Curve would not exist as one of our songs if it wasn't for us figuring out how do we write a may or may not be true breakup song that happens like Groundhog's day over and over on the Conchohakin curve going into Philly.
[00:09:44] Speaker A: Which is in the spirit of fun.
[00:09:46] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:09:47] Speaker A: You kind of get a little silly.
[00:09:48] Speaker C: You know, that's one of the unforeseen amazing things. Like, when we started it, it was really just four people independently, just kind of, like, as accountability partners, but going off in our own little corners and writing songs. And over several years, this, well, a collaborative spirit arose, and many songs, I think something like nine to 10% of all phalan songs every year are collaborations between people. But then also the spirit of, like, just picking arbitrary challenges. I mean, doing 14 songs in 28 days is arbitrary enough, but then people are like, here, write a song about toasters in 1 hour, and then, like, 20 people go and do it at the exact same time, during the exact same hour, and then post the song at the end of the hour, and that's called a skirmish, and that's been going on for decades now. It's a community that likes to play games. Most of the people in the community like to play these games and aren't too precious about ideas, which is a real breath of fresh air. There's a lot of songwriters groups are more critique oriented and less just hooray oriented, you know, and there's a place for both, I believe. But, yeah, that's a happy accident.
[00:10:59] Speaker B: Yeah. I was wondering, when we post songs, a lot of times, the technological side, you're saying, oh, you can post a YouTube link, or you could post a link to a server on your website or whatever it might be in MP3. I'm curious because I wasn't there when it first started, but when you start something like this, I guess you're thinking, do I need server space, or do I let people just post links to their own server space? How is it going to look? You know, because sometimes you'd post something from Soundcloud or something like that, and it looks a certain way and the YouTube link looks a certain way, and then I would post something from my webpage just as a link, and it would not be a player. It'd just be like, go to this link. And I could imagine, like, you've got a huge set of challenges trying to make it user friendly for all the various ways that people are going to do it. And I'm curious if when you're doing that and it's during the month and you're kind of solving problems for people, are you able to still keep your creative songwriting going during that time, or do you choose, like, march and secretly post things during that?
So that's a multi tiered question, but it seems like over the years, you've probably refined that process, I'm guessing. So I'm curious how that's developed since, I guess, early on.
[00:12:15] Speaker C: Those are great questions. Well, one thing to say is, Phomm started in 2004, so it was before YouTube existed, before, I think, before Soundcloud. So back then, if you posted a demo, it was generally like a hotlinked mp3 that you had to have your own server. But then over time, these other platforms arose, and we started finding ways of embedding those. And so, yeah, there's some business logic in the programming that can get a little rat's nesty to, like, figure out this person is posting their mp3 to Dropbox, but we want it to be able to embed and play on the page because we want to support maybe not every method under the sun, but as many different ways that people choose to share their demos as possible. As far as the creative output side, the reality is, from 2011 to 2020, I kind of kept fam alive, but was not very involved.
I finished my PhD in Wisconsin in 2009, moved to Pittsburgh, worked at Carnegie Mellon University for a few years, and then Duolingo spun out of Carnegie Mellon, and I kind of spun out with it. And for that decade, my hands were full, so I wasn't.
[00:13:33] Speaker A: So you were part of the team that founded Duolingo?
[00:13:36] Speaker C: I wasn't one of the founders, but I joined, like, six months in or so.
[00:13:39] Speaker A: Wow. And what were you doing? What was your part?
[00:13:42] Speaker C: Well, my background, what my PhD from Wisconsin was in, is artificial intelligence and natural language processing.
[00:13:48] Speaker A: And what year was 2011?
[00:13:49] Speaker C: 2009 was when I defended.
[00:13:51] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:13:51] Speaker C: And then I moved to Pittsburgh at the end of 2009 and was at Carnegie Mellon through 2012. And then I started at Duolingo at the end of 2012, and I was there for a decade. And I was also in a band for most of that time. Yeah, basically, as soon as I landed here in 2009, a friend from Madison had just formed a band, and they were looking for a guitar player. I bumped into him at the bus stop, and I was like, oh, I hear you guys have a gig next month. I'm planning to. It's on my calendar. I'm planning to go. And he said, yeah, about that. Do you want to play with us? Play guitar?
[00:14:25] Speaker A: This was in Pittsburgh.
[00:14:26] Speaker C: Yeah, and this was in Pittsburgh as soon as I got here. And I was also in that band for a decade. So I think a lot of my creative musical outlet came mostly through that band, and I didn't kind of need the phalm community as much to get my personal creative juices going. Although most of the songs that we wrote and recorded in that band were things that we wrote for Phalm, we would get together physically, you know, and then, like, write songs together as a band or bring songs that we wrote during phaum to practice. But anyway, yeah, I wasn't super involved, and I was just kind of, like, keeping the servers on for a decade. And then the pandemic happened. The band broke up just before the pandemic happened, too, and I kind of got more involved again and got very excited about it again.
And then after a decade run at Duolingo, and I was kind of ready for something else, I decided to take a step back, and for the last couple of years, I've been doing some consulting and stuff like that, but I've been reinvesting myself in February, album writing month.
[00:15:31] Speaker A: Is this basically your job at this point?
[00:15:33] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, like I said, I'm also doing some consulting and stuff to pay the bills, but my only affiliation sort of at the moment, yeah. Has fallen.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: Doing something like this takes a lot of energy, takes a lot of oomph. And was there a point at which you realized, this is becoming a thing? I'm going to need to really sink my time and energy into this? And was there like ever a gut check moment? Like, boy, do I really want to continue to do this while I have these other things going on in my life?
[00:16:01] Speaker C: That's a good question. I don't remember. I mean, I think I remember around 2010.
Cause at that point Fam was growing. It was almost doubling every year. So it wasn't quite exponential growth, but it was, it was growing really fast. And I was worried that it was gonna be, you know, I can't do this anymore. And then weirdly, after 2010, for the next decade, and maybe this just coincides with the fact that I was in another band and I was really busy, you know, working for a tech startup, and so I was putting less into it, but it just didn't grow. It flatlined, like the number of people involved every year, the number of songs that give every year, basically any metric you look at around FAm was flat for like 2011 to 2020.
[00:16:46] Speaker A: And why do you think that was?
[00:16:48] Speaker C: I mean, it could be what I just said about being in a band or most of my energy was going toward Duolingo and research, but you weren't.
[00:16:57] Speaker A: Pushing it, that it was kind of self sustaining.
[00:16:59] Speaker C: I think that's part of the explanation. I think another part of the explanation is around that time is when a critical mass of human beings got phones, you know, smartphones and Twitter and Facebook and YouTube were like concerns. And basically everybodys online community attention got consolidated onto these platforms. So like more niche built for purpose websites like Faum, I think, started to get less attention. Either people who were involved started to spend less time with it, or it was just harder to discover them because the search engine optimization was focused on these big mega platforms. And weirdly, FOM has started growing again since the pandemic.
And again, it's hard to tell if that's because I've been putting more into it or if it's because there's maybe a cultural shift away from these consolidated platforms and backdoored into niche communities. I don't really know.
[00:17:57] Speaker A: I do have to say that ever since maybe 2021 or so, it has seemed a little bit more lively, you know, that it seems like you're mixing it up more. Your gentle, benign presence is felt in a way that maybe it wasn't. You know, when I would look and see bur settles two songs this month, I. Okay, well, maybe I don't have to finish it either. But now it's like, burr's doing it. If he's doing 20, I got to at least do 14.
[00:18:27] Speaker C: Yeah, well, 2021 was the first year I won fam.
[00:18:31] Speaker A: Really?
[00:18:32] Speaker C: Since 2010.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: Right, right.
[00:18:34] Speaker C: So, yeah, for that whole decade, I was just, like, dribbling out a few songs, but. But I was running the servers. I was like, fam generally is a congenial place. There's not really many flame wars and stuff, but when they did fire up, you know, I was kind of called in by the mods, you know, so I was involved in that capacity. And, Michael, to get back to your question from, like, ten minutes ago.
[00:18:53] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:18:55] Speaker C: For that, I. Ten years or so, I really wasn't concerned about my own creative outlet. It was a thing that I just kind of kept running because it was. I don't know, it was just a thing that I did every February. But then once I started to get reinvested in it and I started writing songs again, like 21, 22, those were actually kind of interesting, tough years for me, because I was constantly trying to fix and improve the website and respond to people's feature requests and things like that, while also trying to meet my own creative needs. I rewrote the website code from scratch with the help of another farmer named Beethoven in 22. So it's an entirely new code base, much more modern, easier to maintain for the last two years, and we started adding features again. But we've just decided all the feature engineering happens in the off months. And as soon as the website opens in February, only critical bug fixes. If something is not working that absolutely has to work, we'll drop everything and fix it. Other than that, you know, all of your feature requests and concerns and complaints and stuff just go into a folder and we ignore it until, you know, so that we can write songs.
[00:20:03] Speaker B: That's. That's super smart. I mean, obviously you're super smart, but I think that's. That's. I love that idea of workflow. So you give yourself space. I think that's good.
[00:20:13] Speaker C: And it's funny, most of the phone community, I think, gets that and appreciates it, but then there's, like, this vocal minority that are just like, but I, but I want a like button now.
[00:20:26] Speaker B: That wasn't a feature when we started this, so. So why do you want it now? No, I'm just joking. I always wonder, I was talking to someone and they were, we were talking about whether computers are naturally intuitive.
[00:20:40] Speaker C: You mean to use, to use just.
[00:20:42] Speaker B: The interface of just computers in general and technology. And I think the consensus was that it wasn't in this conversation that it's a very deeply learned, like, you just, you have to go in and learn about that workflow. And I thought about it almost like when I'm using logic versus pro tools, like, I've got a good workflow with logic pro tools. Not so much. It's just a digital tape machine at that point. I could use sonar, like all the.
[00:21:12] Speaker C: Various programs, you know, people get into holy wars about daws.
[00:21:16] Speaker A: So.
[00:21:17] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, and it's, to me, it's like, if it, if you can get it to sound good and it's the workflow. I don't care if you use garageband or not. I've heard many people who say, yeah, I use garageband. And I'm like, I had no idea. You just make it sound great anyway. And I'm like, okay, cool. But I just imagine that trying to figure out whether you do a like button or, you know, how social media oriented do you push the website so that it's familiar to everyone? And then how much do you say, no, we're not going to do that because we're the different. I imagine it's a challenge.
[00:21:51] Speaker C: Yeah, it's a lot of both because people ask for features that mirror what they're familiar with on the social media websites. And some of those things we incorporate or plan to incorporate. Then there's other things like the like button in particular, which I drawing a line in the sand where like, I just don't think that's appropriate. And there's, I've got my reasons for that, among them being I think it makes people lazy. It creates a perverse incentive for people to just go and like a bunch of things without, you know, actually listening the song, actually giving any feedback. And while I understand and feel very personally that it's actually kind of hard to invest some mental energy into listening to someone's nascent song and figure out what encouraging, positive thing to say about this, and that takes some work. And a lot of times I listen to a song and I don't leave a comment because it's too hard.
[00:22:46] Speaker A: Oh, me too.
[00:22:47] Speaker C: But I don't think having a like button would actually make that better. I think there's just value. And some people use the comments box as a virtual like button where they just say, great, and, you know, that's it.
But most of the time, people, I think most of the fom community, puts effort into identifying a lyric that they particularly resonated with or like, commenting on a particular chord change or key change or tempo change, you know, between the verse and the chorus or something like that. And I think I, I mean, I know, I personally, even if I didn't necessarily leave a comment, like, sometimes I'll hear a song and think, oh, that's clever. And then it inspires me to go and try that technique out and write a song, and then after I posted the song, then I'll go back and leave a comment that was sort of like, hey, this inspired me to try this trick that you used. And, yeah, I think a like button would just make people lazy.
[00:23:43] Speaker B: Well, you know, I think of when I'm doing fam each year, whether I'm doing a lot or a little, you know, I see Aaron Nathan's page and Phil Henry's page and Nancy Roast and all these folks, and I see all this communication. Right. And so I'm kind of on the other end of it. It kind of mirrors my Michael Ronce that has a lot of albums and a lot of songs. I'm proud of them. I think it's good quality, but I've got my ten fans and that's cool. And they interact a little bit. But I love getting the first zong, as I've seen it posted.
[00:24:14] Speaker A: And what is a zong, Michael?
[00:24:16] Speaker B: Well, I think that's the first one, right?
[00:24:18] Speaker A: The first comment on a new song.
[00:24:20] Speaker C: Yeah, a zong is a zero comment song. And Zong busting is. There are people who intentionally go out just finding songs with no comments yet and commenting on them.
[00:24:29] Speaker B: So my first song, my first song always gets three to six comments and then the rest of it, for the rest of Pham, gets nothing. But it's one of those things where I love that moment when I do get a comment every so often. So it surprises me which ones do get comments and what people focus on, because, and I could imagine, and I can agree with you in the sense that, like, yeah, if there was a like button, it wouldn't make me feel any better. If I had 20 people liking it. I want to know what they thought about it, what you think, and that's, that's special. So in my capacity of not having a ton of comments on my music. When I get them, it's really special, and it's kind of like YouTube comments. I get a. An occasional YouTube comment, and it's really special. Occasionally there's a junk comment and. And I have to just delete it, and it makes me sad. But that doesn't happen with vom at all. Like, it's all, you know, when people say something, they really, you know, thought deeply about it and deeper than I even thought about it, probably because my subconscious wrote the song. So, you know.
[00:25:31] Speaker C: Yeah, that's. That's. I find that as a surprising thing, too. Like, when people bother to leave a comment, they often will point something out that you didn't even realize in the moment. And then also, I think the flip side, like, one of the other reasons I think a like button would be bad is because it trains you, as the person who's posting a song, to obsess over, you know, how many likes. I mean, you can obsess over how many comments your songs are getting, too. But I think ultimately, whenever we think about new features for Phom, the underlying question is, is this going to help people be more productive in writing songs and anything that taps in too far into that gamification, obsessively checking the website and stealing your attention economy, that's time you could be writing songs, but instead, you're logging into fom, which is ostensibly there to help you write songs.
So any sort of feature that, like, steals from your songwriting juice and pumps it into, like, you know, I don't know, capitalistic, you know, algorithm juice or whatever, I'm not in favor of that.
[00:26:47] Speaker B: I love that. It's a really organic approach. It seems like you're there to serve the purpose, rather than. Yeah, like you said, you're not there to benefit. I mean, you. I don't know if there's a financial benefit. I really don't have care too much. I just think the website serves in a really organic, nice way to a community of songwriters. So it's one of those things where, whatever it is, I like how that's the first thing you consider. So that makes me, like, faum. About a thousand percent more than I already did. So thank you for telling us that. That's amazing.
[00:27:21] Speaker A: So that's part one of our interview with Bursettles, but it's a really interesting part two, which you will hear next week. So come on back.
[00:27:32] Speaker B: Peace.
