Last friday afternoon, NPR’s Monitor Mix, a blog written by Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and devoted to deep thoughts about today’s music, noted that many musicians these days have their own recording setups, and issued a “Write And Record A Song In A Weekend” challenge.
Short version: I wrote a brand new song and you can hear it on their blog page here: just scroll down in their black & white player widget until you see “Radio Nowhere – “Firecracker” – it’s the sixth song in the list. Read on for the rest of the story…
Their ground rules:
a) The song and recording had to be brand new, started from scratch
b) The song had to contain at least one of these five words: dog, lampshade, firecracker, NPR, Japan
c) The track had to be uploaded to Monitor Mix by 5pm Sunday night.
Sounds like fun, right? I thought so, plus something about the percussive nature of the word “firecracker” instantly had my musical wheels turning. I briefly toyed with a rock opera based on an NPR report about a Japanese dog who brought a lampshade and some firecrackers to a house party, but…um, no.
Unfortunately, I had unbreakable plans for Friday night, Saturday night, and all day Sunday, which whittled NPR’s generous 48 hour bequest down to a 10 hour sprint: 8.5 hours straight on Saturday and 90 minutes of triaged insanity between 3:30 and 5pm on Sunday.
I ended up getting the song in to Monitor Mix at 5 o’clock on the dot.
You can hear it on their blog page here: just scroll down in their player until you see “Radio Nowhere – “Firecracker” – it’s the sixth song in the list.
Hope you like it [and if you dig it enough to leave a comment on their blog, thus inciting other visitors to check out the song, well, I wouldn’t mind that at all ;)…]
P.S. If you like this whole idea and want to hear more about it, I just found out that NPR’s “Weekend Edition” will be airing a piece on the project – and interviewing some of the musicians involved – tomorrow morning (Saturday 11/21).