The month of dead presidents and candied hearts just got cooler. Actually, the change occurred in 2004 when four music-minded friends challenged one another to write 14 songs in the month’s 28 days. They posted recordings of their songs online and maintained a flow of feedback for each other’s work. Now in its seventh year, February Album Writing Month boasts more than 1,000 participants—amateur musicians, professionals, dabblers, and poets—who accept the annual challenge.
Following Jack London’s advice, “You can’t wait for inspiration; you have to go after it with a club,” fawmers leap headlong into a four-week maelstrom of creativity, cheap computer recording, and FAWM-spawned challenges for songwriters suffering from writer’s block. Participation is free, and though there’s no reward for those who trudge all the way to the 14-song mark, the FAWM website alluringly promises “the admiration of your songwriting peers.” For those who fail to hit the 14-song mark, the FAWM site philosophically offers this nugget of comfort and wisdom: “Let’s say you only write two. That’s still more than zero, right?”
To give an idea of the project’s popularity, the website features a region cloud displaying areas of the world with active fawmers scaled in size according to the number of participants in each region. California has by far the largest region, triple the size of New York, which falls second. While the Central Coast isn’t the FAWM hotbed that Sacramento and Los Angeles have proven to be, the area has its share of musicians committed to the 2010 plunge.
Steve Key traces his interest all the way back to grade school, playing the clarinet in the fifth grade, then to high school during the ’70s when singer/songwriters ruled the airwaves. Everybody had guitars, including Key, who learned to play at the age of 12 with the Boy Scouts. He had his first paying gig as a junior in college and subsequently began touring bars.
Now, 30 years later, Key mostly works as a booking agent, putting together showcases for singer-songwriters at venues in Santa Maria and San Luis Obispo County. He estimates that he hasn’t released a new CD in the past seven or eight years. But that hasn’t stopped him from generating new work. This February marks Key’s second FAWM go-around.
“Twenty-eight days did not seem to be an unreasonable time to focus my attention on writing,” said the musician, who successfully hit the 14-song mark. “I feel guilty that I’m not one of those disciplined writers. It’s just when it comes to me.”
Song concepts come from anywhere—an item in the news or something someone says. These days, Key spends altogether too much time on Facebook, by his own reckoning. But lyrics frequently crop up through online conversations and comments. Feedback from other musicians helps as well, and the project serves as a safe haven from an industry that can often be downright brutal.
It’s all very positive,” Key said. “You won’t see a lot of people ripping into each other. FAWM participants are looking to encourage you, to find the good. I like to encourage the members of the FAWM community to pursue songwriting. God knows, there’s a lot of discouragement out there for writing.”
The father/husband/songwriter
On the FAWM site he shares with friend and fellow musician (and, for full disclosure, Sun editor Ryan Miller), Bret Rooks cites his annual FAWM goal as writing “as many songs as we can while not ignoring our respective wives or daughters.” In the pair’s three years of collaboration as Halfpenny Orchestra, Rooks estimates that the most they’ve accomplished is seven songs in a single FAWM period.
Besides working full time as an engineer, Rooks has two daughters, one aged 3 years and one six months old.
Rooks was one of the first people to sign up for FAWM, back in 2005 when participants were still few enough that everybody pretty much knew everybody. But he didn’t start posting songs until the following year. And creativity really flourished when he joined forces with Miller.
“Most of the time we kind of generate ideas on our own,” he explained. “We’ll get together a couple times a week and work together. We’re both very word-minded people, so the lyrics are individual and the music is more bouncing ideas off each other.”
They cite a range of influences on their FAWM site, including The Decemberists, Mountain Goats, Bob Dylan, Sufjan Stevens, Radiohead, and Simon and Garfunkel, but humorously add a warning that their music “may or may not actually sound like any of these artists.”
Their recording equipment is minimal, consisting of a computer, sound cord, and small mixing board in the back room of Rooks’ house. They’ve got some microphones, a bass and acoustic guitar, and a keyboard, recording each part one at a time and then layering them into a song.
Thus far, the songs they produce have had little life outside FAWM. Sometimes they play their songs in friends’ backyards. And Rooks’ brother confessed that he downloaded all of their songs and listens to them on his iPod. His mother is also a fan, and Rooks will sometimes play his favorite songs for co-workers.
“I think our songwriting has gotten better over time,” he said. “In the future, I could see us playing a little more at coffee shops when our children are a better age. But for the moment we’re not thinking about that too much. When it comes down to it, it’s a creative outlet. It’s nothing I’m going to leave my family to pursue.”
Ashley Schwellenbach is arts editor for New Times, the Sun’s sister paper in San Luis Obispo. She likes to watch kittens grow. Send fluffy mittens to aschwellenbach@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Feb 18-25, 2010.