International

Concept

Album

Month

All this traveling, over all this water...time to capture the vibes.  This project will unify around the theme of nautical and island travel, with songs inspired (in part) by a 2024 songwriting workshop on a tall masted sailing ship in the Hebrides Islands, with ocean stops in Reunion, Madagascar, Iceland, New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore.

Mission accomplished, and within the standard guidelines as far as I can tell.  I revised one song, "Your Shores Are Calling Me Home" by making significant edits to lyrics I had written a couple of years earlier.  Similarly, I revised a song that in February I completed for a FAWM song challenge, and expanded the lyrics and the instrumental break for InCoAlMo.  Finally, my sole instrumental was also recorded in February for FAWM and fit my concept album for March so I included that as well (Dream Galloping in Donegal).  There are a couple of new (to me) sonic experiments this time around and I suppose they offer some contrast and texture.

I have the "concepts of a plan", which is to say, 'not a single clue', but I kinda wanna set things on fire lately and have been listening to a lot of nine inch nails, so maybe it will be angry.

The Rule of 40:

Total Runtime 40:29!! Winner!

​The Rule of 30: No more than 30% of the album can be written before March 1

0% written before March 1!! I noodled a bit on Feb 28, but not until after March 1 started in Australia, and I don't think anything I did that night counts as 'writing'. Winner!

The Rule of 20: No more than 20% of the album can be recorded before March 1

0%! Winner!

​​

The Rule of 10: No more than 10% of the album can be a cover

The only non-original content on this record are Garage Band Drum tracks in two or three places. I'm calling it 1%. Winner!

I do have a 'bonus track' ZZ Top cover recorded, but it's not listed here because it totally wrecks the vibe of the end of the record. Link in the Discord.

The Rule of Zero:

See you next year, Rule of Zero. I didn't need you this year.

An album of covers of favorite songs, curated for maximum Ka-BLAM...

It worked! I only got 7 tracks finished enough to send, but had a total ball with the project. The concept was pretty loose, which was to make a covers album. I challenged myself to not just copy arrangements, but to mess around with them. There are songs from Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, Tom T. Hall, Natalie Merchant, Echo and the Bunnymen, Camper van Beethoven, James McMurtry, and Ann Arbor's finest: Bob Seger. Lionbelly made all the noise, with special guest Candi Appl (vocals on "Memphis" and "Outskirts")

(I lay no claim to these songs and am not selling these, etc. The link is set to private, which will hopefully keep it from getting flagged by anyone on SoundCloud. Thus, this may only be up for a bit).

UPDATE: Dang it! I totally forgot the 40-30-20-10 rules, so this is less of an INCOALMO win, and more of a "at least I recorded some stuff" dealio. Ha! Anyhoo...

Songs about the things I spend my time on. (So no songs about writing music, I guess. Zing!)

Wrote songs about cleaning, cooking, and playing my favorite game, Satisfactory. So did actually manifest a concept, which is rare for me. But only wrote 3 songs, which is light for me.

A short story, poem, or song a day

I wrote a short story romance this month; which met the challenge for me of writing something I've never written before.

Amidst living a new life halfway across the world from where i'm used to, how close can i come to meeting the Rule of 40 by starting half a month late, writing songs as fast as i can whenever i can find time, and then just recording them live with no post-production on my phone?

Only the next 9 days can tell ...

Well, apparently the answer to the question above is about 28 minutes short.  :D

This year was difficult for me, but i still had some fun with it.  There were a lot of factors that affected my time, energy, and (to be honest) inspiration to create this year.  I was excited about the _idea_ of this, our 10th year of the annual InCoAlMo challenge, but i felt like i had some blocks and setbacks from feeling jazzed about the musical possibilities that i had in mind.

That said, as the month went on and i couldn't seem to get any of my ideas to take root, i tried to really just embrace the core underlying idea behind InCoAlMo in general (and The Rule Of 0 in particular): creating something is better than creating nothing.  That's when i finally gave things a go, and after getting a couple of songs underway, finally officially registered for the challenge.

Process-wise, just focusing on writing, playing, and super-simple recording was a nice change; it really let me engage more with the most-fun parts of the process.  It meant really limiting my instrumentation, layering (none), and post-production (almost none), but made the whole endeavor much less daunting.  That said, it did pose the problem of really having to be able to perform the music live; there was no option to overdub, comp, or make complex edits.  This was really the single biggest challenge to production, especially on the somewhat-complicated instrumental track (which, because i wanted a metronome, actually required _two_ phones (as did the album cover)).

All told, i'm pretty happy with the product (under-12-minute runtime notwithstanding).  I wrote a couple of neat little tunes, had fun with them, and got to throw another drop of music into the ocean to add to the background radiation of the universe.  It's also got me thinking about how i might try to leverage this type of creative freedom on future projects.

Thanks to all my fellow InCoAlMo artists who helped inspire me — especially this year — to keep it Real.

This album is a song for song response to the musical genius of the Smiths' "The Queen is Dead" (think Liz Phair's "Exile in Guyville"'s relationship to the Rolling Stones).  This album exists in the modern timeline and knows exactly  how disappointing M******** has become.

Inspired by Time by Pink Floyd, further exploring the idea that time is a limited resource. Emphasizing that because of this, we are all destined to be underachievers, so we should celebrate what we were able to accomplish rather than regret all the times we fell short of our goals.

not available yet

The dissolution of winter from an outburst of spring

Protest songs.

There's a lot of stuff going on right now, most of it bad.  It's enough to inspire one to write music about it.

These ain't no Arlo Guthrie folk rock protest songs;  I'm thinking loud, noisy, angry, heavy, screaming protests.  Somewhat inspired by Queensryche's "Revolution Calling" but I can't get that big of a sound.  We'll see.

I'm also going to be on holiday for 2 weeks of the month where I won't have an instrument to play.  So we'll see how that affects things too.

Rock on!!