Q&A: What It Was Like to Write & Record 52 Songs in 52 Weeks

Kate Sloan

I’ve been having some convos with friends and family lately about the songwriting challenge I did this year, and have enjoyed explaining what made me want to do the challenge, what went into it, and what I took away from it. I found that lots of folks, especially other creatives, were interested in hearing about this – so I thought I’d write a blog post to wrap it all up!

 

Q. Wait. Did you really write and record 52 songs in 52 weeks?

A. Weirdly enough, I did.

 

Q. Why, though?

A. A fair question. A couple things happened within close proximity of each other last December: I wrapped up an educational program called “Meaningful Activity” that I’d been doing at my local chronic pain clinic, which had been leading me through a process of identifying my core values and the things that bring me the most joy, and figuring out how to do more of those things, more often, despite living with chronic pain and chronic fatigue. It came up over and over again in my worksheets and journal entries for that program that I missed music, cared about music, loved making music, and hadn’t been making nearly enough music. At the time that I did this program, I hadn’t written a song in nearly 4 years. In high school I used to crank out multiple songs a month sometimes. I realized I missed that and wanted to be doing significantly more of it.

The other thing that happened was that I spent a solid couple weeks living alone that month because my roommate had gone to stay with her family for the holidays, and I realized that a lot of my reticence to play music lately had been self-consciousness about being heard, but that I didn’t really need to worry about that because my sweet roommate had always expressed supportiveness about my music-making. So I started playing more songs, and even wrote a couple, and then thought, hey, wouldn’t I be happier if I was doing this every single week? So I assigned myself the challenge.

 

Q. Did you really think you’d be able to complete the challenge when you started it?

A. Honestly, no. I thought fatigue, pain, and/or apathy would get the better of me at some point and I’d call it quits. It felt equally possible that I would quit 7 months in or that I would quit after the first week. I think I just don’t believe in myself as much as I should, especially when it comes to professional goals.

 

Q. Where did you get ideas for your songs? Did it ever feel like you were running (or had run) out of ideas?

A. Coming up with conceptual/lyrical ideas is one of the hardest parts of the process for me, which is partly why I sometimes don’t even start with a conceptual/lyrical concept – I’ll start by improvising some lyrics and melodies over a chord progression and kind of just free-associate about what the music reminds me of. This approach can feel more like the song is revealing its theme to me, rather than me coming in with a predetermined theme of my own.

Aside from that – often I would see something in media that would inspire a song: “The Museum” was based on some lines lifted from an Oliver Sacks essay, “Love is Blind” is about the Netflix dating reality show of the same name, “Does He Know?” was inspired by a love triangle on the TV comedy Superstore, “Credit Card” was written soon after I watched The Tinder Swindler, “The Stage” was based on a scene from a documentary about the musical Spring Awakening, “Celia” was an ode to a character from the book The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, “Grandmaster” was a love song for a cult leader inspired by NXIVM’s Keith Raniere, and “Sisyphus” was about Nick Drake and some biographies I’d read of him.

Sometimes songs were inspired by conversations I’d had with people in my life: “Bi Enough” came out of a conversation with my therapist about bisexual impostor syndrome, “Doll” was based on a story a friend told me about his sex doll, and “Amicably” was about a friend’s relatively civil breakup.

Sometimes I would ask my Instagram or Twitter followers to submit a theme, quote, or idea to inspire a song; “Brave Little Girl” was one of those. Sometimes I would pull two tarot cards and ponder their meanings, separately or together, until a song idea appeared; “Mr. Mean” and “What If?” were some of these. Sometimes I would go to RandomWordGenerator.com and have it give me 3 random words to inspire a song; “Notice Me” and “Nobody Likes Me” were some of those. One time, a dream inspired a song; I wrote “Stay” after waking up from a terrible nightmare.

 

Q. What did you learn about songwriting from doing this challenge?

A. A WHOLE LOT. As with any artistic discipline, you definitely get to know your own creative process much more intimately when forced to spend time on it every week. I kept notes on what I learned/observed over the course of the year; here’s a few highlights:

  • I used to have a bad habit of recording and posting new songs immediately after writing them, rather than going through subsequent stages of editing and practicing the song to polish it up. You would think that having to crank out a song every week would’ve made this worse, but it actually made me better at letting songs breathe for a day or more after writing them, and practicing them enough that I could perform them well on camera, because I would always feel like, “Well, I have until Sunday to get this done. Might as well make it as good as I can within that timeframe.” By the end of the challenge, I would pretty much always listen to my initial demo a few times for 1-3 days after writing the song and make changes to anything that started to seem awkward or unpolished. I would also practice the song a lot more before recording it.
  • I quickly realized that it was CRUCIAL for me to have a reliable and searchable repository of ideas that I could pull from when I had writer’s block. I use the Notes app for conceptual ideas and lyrical fragments, and another app called Voice Record Pro to record and organize musical ideas, as well as demos to help me remember a song I’m writing/have already written. Realistically, I won’t always be able to immediately develop an idea that comes to me, because I have a job and stuff. So I had to get very disciplined about documenting even the tiniest snippets of ideas so that they’d be available when I needed them.
  • You’ll make some of your best art when it feels safe to make bad art. And because it was a weekly challenge, I knew that it was fine for some of the songs to be less good than I might otherwise prefer (though I think almost all of them are at least pretty good). Jonathan Mann, who has written a song every day for 14 years running, estimates that “70% are mediocre, 20% suck and 10% are awesome.” Sitting down with my list of 52 songs and ranking them, I did the math and found that I think 33% are great, 37% are good, 19% are mediocre and 11% are bad. I’m pretty happy with those numbers!
  • Whenever I felt stuck, I almost always found that switching things up helped inspire me. I’d play around on different instruments, try writing to loops in GarageBand, go to a different location to write, etc. It really helps.
  • Songwriting boosts my self-esteem! I admire great songwriters and their craft a lot, and it makes me feel so good about myself to write songs that I think are good. All the more reason to do it more often! I think this was also largely the reason I never really “half-assed” a song during this challenge – any time I considered taking the “easy way out” (like writing a song that was really simple, bad, or based on a song I’d written before), I knew I’d be disappointed with myself if I did that, so I didn’t.
  • Creativity requires rest. The resting phase is part of the creative process, not separate from it. After I write a song, I typically need to take at least a few days off from trying to write another one, or it just won’t work. I can use that time to “refill the well” by consuming media on a broad range of topics that might later inspire a song.

 

Q. What are your favorite songs from the challenge?

A. Sorry, they’re my babies; I refuse to pick just one. Instead, I will pick eight.

 

Q. But your whole thing is that you write about sex. What are the sexiest/kinkiest songs from the challenge?

A. If you want sexy and sex-adjacent, you want these:

 

Q. Are you going to keep writing and recording a song a week?

A. I actually have been. I don’t know how long I’ll continue it, but I felt a little sad that the challenge was ending and decided there was no reason I had to stop if I didn’t want to. You can always see the latest ones on my YouTube!