“If I Miss the Deadline” is a song I released earlier this year (May 2016). For the past 6 months its only public exposure was on my SoundCloud, but yesterday I released a slightly remixed version on YouTube. YouTube doesn’t allow you to swap a posted video, so putting anything up there requires a greater degree of commitment — the only way to correct any mistakes is to take the video down and put up a new one. The original mix revealed some places that I wanted to explore for improvements, so I’m glad I did it this way.
In 2015 I spent a lot of time making videos, some of which were about songwriting. But it occurred to me that while I preached about songwriting, I wasn’t actually writing songs. At that point Minnasia was on back burner for months, so I set out to write songs for myself. Here are the conditions I set for my new songs:
- I needed to be able to play the guitar and sing the song at the same time. No complicated guitar riffs.
- The song needs to come across fine in a solo, acoustic setting, at least as a truncated version. I’d allow myself long instrumental section for the full production recording, but that part may be omitted if I were to play by myself.
- I needed to feel that the song represents where I am now as a songwriter. I have a stash of old songs that are not yet recorded and that was part of the reason why I wasn’t writing new ones — why write songs that I don’t have occasions to record or perform? But I really needed to see where I was as a songwriter after spending some time analyzing other people’s songs.
The song started out as “Drought.” I loved the simplicity of this one, very introspective and vulnerable. When I finished writing it, I was very excited. I set out to write a song that was “me” and there it was. Actually I wrote two songs in that stretch, and the other one turned out great also. My faith in myself as a songwriter got a big affirmation.
After that I vowed that there will never be another extended period in which I’m neither writing nor recording original songs. I am a musicmaker, and my passion is to make songs that say “I’m with you” to those who are hurting inside. I need to honor this desire, I need to be doing this all the time.
It’s been about a year since then, and I now have four ready-to-record songs in my stable. Of which this is the first song to see the light of day as a full-production recording, with another almost finished. These are long songs (between 7-10 minutes each) so they take time to develop, but I couldn’t be happier with my creative pursuit.
Thanks for listening.