I AM A JAGUAR

The last songwriting sprint of 2024 with HTWS and I became a Jaguar! Given this sprint spanned eight weeks from October to December, I just knew a Christmas song would be involved!

INVINCIBLE

Prompt 1 specified the inclusion of action in your opening line. Although this song needs some serious editing, I think the bones of it are good, so I will revisit it. It’ll be interesting to see what it becomes and the part of the intention of this journal is to see how the songs evolve.

TIS THE SEASON

Prompt 2 was the Christmas song! My first co-write with HTWS. My co-writer is a great songwriter so that didn’t harm any! He took care of the melody and production (which he’s great at) and I simply wrote the lyrics. I really enjoyed the process, and it was exciting to see what the song would become.

TIME STOOD STILL

The brief for Prompt 3 was a challenge: we were given three different rhythms to choose from. I usually write in 4/4 so chose the 6/8 at 66 bpm rhythm. I wrote a song called Time Stood Still - the melody is decent, the lyrics aren’t terrible, but the tempo is awful: it’s way too slow. This could be something to revisit - we shall see ….

TAKE BACK THE CITY

Prompt 4 was definitely my favourite of the sprint, and we were tasked to write a song in the future tense. It’s not as easy as it sounds and really made me focus on the lyrical side of the songwriting process. I tend to write ‘stories’ which was based in the past or at least the present tense: this was a really interesting exercise, and I am really pleased with the song I wrote. This is going to be a song that I polish up and produce ‘properly’.

ALL I WANT IS YOU

I wrote fifth song during this sprint – it was another Christmas song. It’s a good song - the production is poor. For the hell of it, I entered it into the Christmas FM Song Contest 2024 - I had no illusions it would win but there was a deadline I was working to #discipline. I genuinely don’t think the final songs were much stronger than mine but their production fantastic. If I want my songs to really be taken seriously, I need to take them more seriously myself … [idea brewing here]! The song however, is essentially complete - here are the lyrics.

QUANTITY NOT QUALITY

These first three journal entries bring me up to date with the HTWS sprints in 2024. I’ve signed up again for the sprints next year and in theory, over the 5 sprints, I should complete 20 songs by this time next year as a minimum. I’m a believer that practice makes perfect, and quantity (with good practice techniques) will lead to improvements in quality - this is the basis for one of my favourite parables about creative work:

A ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of the work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class, he would bring his bathroom scales an weigh the work of the Quantity group: 50 lbs of pots rated an A grade, 40 lbs, a B grade and so on. Those being graded on Quality, however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an A. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while all the Quantity group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the Quality group had sat theorising about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

[Art & Fear by David Bayles & Ted Orland']

WHAT’S NEXT?

I’m planning to take part in all five 2025 songwriting sprints with HTWS which should, in theory, produce 20 additional songs. Additionally, I’ll be working on my production skills (Logic Pro X for Dummies was on my Christmas List!).

It’s been a pretty decent 6 months of songwriting :-) Let’s see what can be achieved in 2025 #letsgo

[30.12.24 / CT]