Miss September
I’ll get back to the things I learned from the Dutch shortly. Some things are just interesting, and deserve your attention. This turned up in my email inbox this evening…
Hi Andrew,
I’m a big fan of your New Music Strategies and I wanted to tell you about a website that I’m running.
It’s called Calendar Songs. It all started when, after I’d written a few demos of songs, I kept ending up at the awkward stage of nearly-done but not-finished-yet.
So I started thinking about making a website for my songs (some people won’t see any romance left in the anonymity granted by going online and giving yourself a new name and a specific realm to inhabit, but for me it was a very simple escape from this weird teenage crisis my songwriting had hit).
Once I’d made the decision to do something online I knew I should write original material for it. I wanted a scaffolding and a framework for this music to live on, so I decided to write a song a month, produced to my demo standard of minimal production and very simple backing tracks.
Then I thought to give the songs a bit of a difference I would only write songs inspired by the month they’d been written in: “a calendarsong is not just a song I wrote this month”.
I wrote some rules for the project, like a manifesto. Then I saw the best way of attracting listeners would be to open the songs up for remix, further adaptation and production.
I’d put the remixes up against the originals for listeners to browse and compare. Then, as 12 songs make an album, I announced at the start of the project that at the end of one year I’d release 12 remixes as the calendarsongs record.
I’m now writing the last calendarsong for the year and there are over 150 remixes. It has been a great discipline for me as a songwriter, and as a listener I am constantly surprised and delighted by the way my songs have been mutated and interpreted.
I’m planning the release of the record and to add some value to the project will re-record my originals, so the calendarsongs record will be a double album. Then there will be some gigs, playing some of the remixes live with the remixers.
I am going to do a gig at the end of CMJ at Pianos on October 21st. If you are still in the city and want to come along that would be great. I know you must get a lot of people pestering you to check out their web-savvy-music ideas, and of course you might not fancy the music at all, but I’d love to know what you reckon to the project as a whole.
All best,
Tamara – Calendar Girl
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Huh… shades of Sufjan Stevens’s song-per-state project, only attainable.
Personally, I’m really impressed. The ‘gimmick’ actually works really well as a central theme for a coherent and curated body of an artist’s work, and provides one of the best arguments against the ‘death of the album’ I’ve heard in ages.
And check out some of those remixes: The Incoherent Mumble Train take on ‘January’ is just gorgeous.
This is smart, well-informed stuff that leverages Creative Commons licencing, genuinely understands the online environment and is pretty great all round. I keep worrying that I’ve fallen prey to a really savvy marketeer in the employ of a major corporate, but actually, I kind of wouldn’t mind if that was the case. This is just really clever.
And like all the best creative online marketing ideas, it’s non-replicable. You can’t go out and do your own calendar songs… nobody would care. You have to have your own idea of that calibre, and be the only one doing it for this sort of thing to work.
‘Calendar Girl’ Tamara’s also a member of Freeform Five, who I ended up checking out, and also decided I like (video here).
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What do you think of the concept? Unnecessarily programmatic? All style, no substance? Or a great way to engage an audience, build promotion into the product itself and generate buzz through participation?
9 Comments. Write a comment or link to this post
Darren Landrum
I think that if you have a great idea like this, and it fits with your vision and what you’d like to do or otherwise helps you to create a vision, then by all means, go for it. A great idea is a great idea, and if you didn’t come up with this idea first, it’s not the end of the world.
I like to think that my own ideas on how to create my own works, how to finish them, and how to present them to the public will eventually present themselves. Calendar Songs is a great idea, but it doesn’t fit my vision for myself at all. If it worked for someone else, then fantastic. It gives hope to the rest of us.
Sep 24th, 2007
Matt @ Kurb NZ
I’m all about the remixing! Local acts like Sal Dub must do alright out of doubling their output with a remix album – makes sense now with all this lack of scarcity. A remix only takes me a couple of nights tops. When your short on ideas on how to get all interactive and viral, its the obvious one when theres a wealth of myspace bedroom producers waiting to be tapped.
I try not to thrust my zeal for remixing onto my clients but I’ll often suggest it if they’re not keen to give whole original tracks away free. I think it’s a good promotional partnership, I wouldn’t have time to put together a project for release otherwise.
plug plug: I still do remixes for free! Dance/Electronica – Drum’n Bass, downbeat/trip hop, electro, dub etc.
hit me up at http://www.myspace.com/romantech
cheers
Sep 25th, 2007
Gary
Matt, my wife is recording an album soon, and we want to have something cool for the limited edition cd’s, which will hopefully mean people will be more likely to buy the cd than just download the tracks for free. Do you think having wav’s of some vocals on the cd for re-mixers to play with would be a good idea? Is it better to have just vocals for remixers, or would you rather have other tracks (wav’s) as well?
Sep 25th, 2007
music technology
I think that deadlines are a vital part of creativity, rather than being an imposition upon it. This is the premise behind the RPM challenge – http://www.rpmchallenge.com – where bands are challenged to write and record an entire album in 28 days (I also participated in this, taking the easy way out by naming each song after the day it was written). Johnathan Coulton had a similar notion of blogging a song per week and it was quite a success – http://podcomplex.com/blog/index.php/2007/05/17/the-stars-of-social-media/.
So the calendar song idea is a good one – although it unfortunately won’t benefit from being the first of its kind. Maybe bundling the album with a custom-made artist calendar might give it the edge…
Sep 25th, 2007
Christian Ward
Heh, there was a reason my blog is called A Song A Day – to begin with that was actually what I was going to try and create!
I think I got midway through February before real life killed the project and I refashioned the site as resource for DIY musicians. This sounds much more manageable.
And yes Freeform Five are ace, especially Eeeaaow
Sep 26th, 2007
harrisongalaxy
I’ll happily join the chorus of approval for ‘calendar songs’; a good idea, well executed. I firmly believe interaction is critical. And not just any old dialogue, but one which demonstrates authenticity and genuine two-way conversations. This type of comms will begin to distinguish wannabe ‘tesco’ bands from the real movers.
Leveraging the wealth of enthusiasm and talent in bedroom remix land is becoming commonplace. And some of the results are satisfyingly spectacular. I feel there’s a ‘blue peter’ application for this approach too.
Why stop at remixing? The Gorillaz managed to pull off the trick of getting people to submit videos (the winner being paid to promo for a ‘g-side’) a couple of years back, and many artists have caught on since. True followers will design outfits, merchandise and the biggie, as we’ve seen with youtube et al, ‘proper’ content for the website….
Sep 27th, 2007
music technology
gary, I like that idea of remix vocal wavs – if you give remixers free reign to use the samples then they could end up in all kinds of places, and voice is really the most individual ‘instrument’… go for it!
Sep 27th, 2007
Craig TrafFord
A nice idea and an extension of the musicians-who-go-out-and-run-interactive-workshops-where-the-particpants-co-write-re-write-and-record-all-in-a-day model, except with lots more people and minus the geographical and a few technological restrictions. I like it. Freeform Five are v good also. I’m now applying some of these principles to my own kids music work and seeing if I can integrate an album from the words of parents, teachers and childcare practitioners left on my blogs.
Just starting out from scratch, learning as I go, but if you want a look at the matrix as it’s forming go to http://www.earlyearsmusic.com as a starting point.
Thanks for your contribution to the MU seminar in Malvern Andrew. Your talk was totally inspirational, I followed up with your book – which will become a huge part of my library, and now your site which is great.
Sep 28th, 2007
gurdonark
Although I tend to remix ambient and offbeat things more often than I try to create backing tricks for melodic popular song vocals, I found Calendar Girl’s a capellas and the gusto with which she defined the project to be so much fun that I decided to give it a try. The two remixes I’ve posted thus far at ccmixter are nothing to write home about (and the remix or two I elected not to post are not even a postcard’s worth). But the experience has been great fun.
I think that part of what makes the experience so much fun is how well “Calendar Girl” manages the project. It’s done in a straightforward and yet targeted design.
The monthly songs hit the site more or less on schedule.
Although the songs are all pop in orientation, none of them are lyrically or musically too “easy”–this is not some toss-off “look at me, look at me” project. There is not feeling of being oversold, and the website is easy to use and access to hear the other remixes.
Perhaps the most important confirmation of an old truth is that a great deal of what makes the idea work is the work that Calendar Girl puts into the idea. She’s quite gracious to the submitters–including those of us who are incapable of any but the least orthodox entries. She’s attentive to the site, which is regularly updated. She’s attentive to the music. She writes lyrics which are allusive and evocative, ideal for remixing in a variety of genres and moods. Her output of songs and melodies is solid and useful for the remixer. She’s not made any of those needless displays of ego which can arise in this type of thing, and her form of self-promotion is far more nuanced than the “buy my stuff” hard sell that can infect web marketing.
The thing I particularly like about this project is that she completely grasps the Creative Commons idea that the sharing of a capellas for remixing is a positive good and in of itself. The result has been 160 remixes, including some (like the Incoherent Mumble Train modern r & b-savvy mixes and sleeperspaceburn’s layered guitar ethereal rockers) which really fascinate. The site itself is now a fun destination to the listener as well as the remixer, as cool Creative Commons songs abound there for easy listen on the flash widgets on the site or for easy download.
I was not familiar with Free Form Five before I became familiar with the Calendar Songs project, and yet now I find that their “No More Conversations” 2007 video is a favorite to watch, and the song itself will be something I’ll pay to download soon when next I take the time to buy music.
From the beginning, I thought Calendarsongs a brilliant idea, and the ‘pellas fascinating. Yet I resisted trying to remix them, as bpm and pitch matching of popular material is less fun than morphing sound into less expected, more ambient places. But the sheer heart of the project won me over–and I hope that this helps Calendar Girl win over more listeners, as time goes on.
This has been a worthy year of fun Creative Commons remixing by a kind soul who has run it with vim and a sense of fun.
Sep 30th, 2007
So... What do YOU think?