That's 50! I think I can admit now that I was never really sure I'd make it. It's been a story of fits and starts, if I do this next year (and I certainly hope to), I'll be much more comfortable taking a week off or pushing to get as much as possible out of a fertile period. Here's a recap on how it went down.

Started strong, 6 songs in five days. I had just finished "Devil in the White City" and I was reading "A People's History of the Vampire Uprising". Neither book was very good, but they spurred creativity (like "Tallyho"). I noticed a political aspect ("Appropriate Response" and "Unwieldy Mess") to the songs that isn't usual for me.

Went to New Hampshire for a long week, that was rough. I had a lot of trouble finding space (mental and physical) to think about songs. Fell a bit behind and tried fulfilling challenges ("Just this guy" and "Rocking Chair", neither of which were great successes). Four songs in ten days, if my vacation had been much longer I might have given up on finishing the challenge.

Getting home, got back to my space, got back to electric. Reading "The Dark Forest", which was interesting but very dismal. I found I was mostly writing protest songs. On the one hand, "Leader Word Thingies", "Meaningful Communication" and "Do You Need an Invitation?" are all pretty good. On the other, the preoccupation with the stupidity of our national dialogue is getting old fast. I decided to stop reading the news as part of my mental preparation before writing songs, particularly after a couple of fairly ugly offerings from the lowest confluence of the book and the news cycle.

I decided that I needed to cheer up, so I read "Trustee from the Tool Room", which is utterly delightful, and tried to steer toward more upbeat tunes (including the first blithe super-modulator I've written in a while). This was good, with "How to Begin" kicking off a set of songs that were fairly strong and noticeably free of existential despair.

I read Stephen King's "The Stand" at around the same time as FAWMstock, which ended up working pretty well. King is remarkable for his relentless craftsmanship and while "The Stand" didn't give me much in terms of emotional inspiration, it's a pretty strong technical motivator. At the same time I was meeting some great folks and joining in some skirmishes. I followed "The Stand" up with du Maurier's "Rebecca" which had plenty of emotional fodder to work with.

At that point, the bottom fell out of my attempts to stay away from social-political songwriting. Between the party conventions and Kenosha, it felt disingenuous to write about anything else. I had to write a few just to let out the frustration, then I took a week off to get my head together.

That last push was really something. Some songs I really liked came out of this, but it was very uneven. I frankly couldn't always tell what was good. So you get things like "Mind, Body and Soul" which I think is a horrible recording of a very strong song, or "Perfect Gravity" which is half of a great song mixed with a lot of meh. During a lot of this time I couldn't do skirmishes because I lacked the confidence to commit to something in under an hour. But skirmishes were what finally pushed me over, specifically the super skirmish which pushed me not only to commit to an idea quickly, but also to move on to the next idea. Fantastic exercise