Forgery League

Snagged a copy of The Frustrated Songwriter’s Handbook, which so far is a more colourful and detailed retelling of all the Immersion Composition Society’s super-sekrit learnings about creativity.

ICS co-founder Nicholas Dobson on the first ever “composer duel”, wherein he and his friend Michael Mellender locked themselves away in their home studios to record 20 songs in 12 hours:

By the end of the day there were cords and gear tangling and zig-zagging all over my room, and the floor was littered with empty, destroyed junk-food packages. My left eye was twitching, and my session had devolved into a quest to find out what is the most annoying noise a person can make with their mouth.

Then Michael was knocking on the door. He had a cassette tape with his session on it, a six-pack, and more junk food. He stomped around my living room, said a bunch of stuff I don’t remember, and then collapsed on my couch. He said something along the lines of, “I want to do this every day, and never leave my house.”

I said, “Me, too.”

It’s very similar to Scott (Understanding Comics) McCloud’s original 24-Hour Comic duel, some ten years previous - and many other “speed creation” challenges (plays, films, novels, and so on). There’s great fun - granted, in a slightly mad, masochistic way - in setting yourself such a lunatic goal, setting aside all else for the sake of creation. I like to call it “the romance of the all-nighter”.

I suspect that the ICS’s songwriting version may be more fruitful, for a few simple reasons:

• Granularity. Songs are short (usually), and you can keep churning them out. If you really do hit a dead end with one, you can always work on another instead. Conversely, in a comic challenge, every page commits you further to the story you’re working on. Churning out a 24-page book in a day is a great badge of honour - if you succeed. If you don’t, you fail big. With songs, failures aren’t as devastating, and successes, while smaller, are still delightful, and they’re cumulative.
• Regularity. The “lodge system” encourages you to create lots, and often, where as a comic is such a Herculean effort that you’re not likely to attempt it very often.
• The creation of a circle of friends committed to making music regularly and supporting one another’s creative efforts. The ritual is important to this - ordeal and hard work, followed by a rewarding night sharing food and drink and art.

Of course, nothing in this is inherent to music - you could do it with comic strips, or one-pagers, that sort of thing. I expect some creative writing circles have done this sort of thing since forever, but I can’t say for sure.

So it’s time to put all this theory to the test. I’m going to start the Forgery Lodge up again, this time “for real”. Maybe even two sub-Lodges, on an alternating schedule - a face-to-face Lodge here in the music room, and a virtual, long-distance Lodge for further-flung people I know. It probably won’t happen until the new year, but I’m already planning it. One Saturday a month, let’s say…

And in the meantime, tonight’s Song-a-day.

Roller (1’18”)

Started with the organ patch, now that I have the cables to bring in external audio, and added real live bass and guitar too. Didn’t want to wake the roommates, so sadly there are no vocals. I definitely had “Higher Ground” in the back of my head from earlier in the day, and that other piece that sounds like it that I can’t remember now that I could swear has something to do with a vegetable or the word “electric”. God I need to sleep.