Song A Week Retrospective Part1 - Conception

Well it’s been nearly a month since I released the final song from my Song A Week project, so I thought it was time to have a retrospective, to see what I’ve learnt and what (if any) success I’ve had from it. I orginally tried to sum up the entire project into a single blog post but failed to cram a years worth of musical antics into a few paragraphs elequently, so instead I'm going to blog about it in two or three seperate chapters, over the next few weeks and so it gives me great pleasure to present to you, my first chapter explaining the conception of the project!

Code Monkeys
At some point in 2009 I became addicted to a cartoon called Code Monkeys, an original comedy set in the 1980s, which documents the humorous events that take place at a fictitious video games company. If you’re into old video games and you’ve got a sense of humour then I’d highly recommend it. Anyway, after falling in love with this pixelated work of genius I began reading about the show online and discovered that the incredibly catchy theme song was by Jonathan Coulton, and so I went off to his website to download it. The song in question had been released as part of a yearlong project entitled ‘Thing a Week’ for which Coulton wrote and released one new song every week for one year, as soon as I read this my brain started churning, I was thinking stuff like “I probably write a song every week already! Probably more!” and “I could do that standing on my head, and I wouldn’t need to quit my job like he did!” and “I’m having a go at that!” And so my own ‘Song A Week’ project was born.

Preparation
First things first, even though I write and record a lot of songs, I don’t actually release them, they normally sit on my hard drive and then occasionally I round up a selection that sound good together and put them up on my site as an album like I did with ’10 Trafalgar Rd’ and ‘Low Fidelity’. This isn’t that demanding a task and since it didn’t used to happen that often I could get away with a pretty basic website using static html, and no kind of blog or content management system. This had to change if I was going to be releasing new content on a weekly basis and so I redesigned the whole site with Joomla, which meant I had a back end to log into and add new content instantly without having to edit raw code each time.

Secondly I thought it’d be fun to have a podcast, in which I could speak a little about the song each week and then play that week’s song, I did this using Podcast Generator, a simple app that installs to your site and creates the necessary xml that iTunes requires in order to stream your podcast.

Thirdly, I also thought it’d be cool to do a YouTube video for each song as well, I’d maybe talk a bit about the week’s events and creativity and then I’d play the song at the end of the video.

Going Live
I announced my idea to the world via Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace etc. I recorded my first song Hurt Me Bitch, made a little video of me talking about the recording, created a podcast and uploaded the song itself to the site. I set the publishing date so that it wouldn’t show up for download until Friday, 1st January 2010 at 12am.

Sometime after midnight on my mediocre New Years Eve bender in Cambridge I checked my site on my phone, and there it was! My first song in the upcoming series was live!