30 Songs in 30 Days – Day One – Upside Down

We all have stuff we want to be recognised for. For me, I’d like to be remembered as a writer of songs, among other things. In fact, I’m not worried about being remembered, personally, but I’d love something I’ve written to be remembered.

I have a back catalogue of songs I’ve written over the years. If I was run over by a bus tomorrow, dozens of songs would die with me. I’m sure the world would keep revolving without hearing them, but I’d like to save them for posterity, if I can.

Several of my friends (me included) participated in the 30 Days of Music meme, where they blogged one song per day for 30 days, each day with a different theme, (A Song That You Wished You Heard On The Radio, A Song I Can Dance To, that sort of thing). And/or they have done 30 Days of X, such as Russell Davies’ 30 Daily Sketches.

So following a similar meme, I thought I’d do 30 Songs in 30 Days, a video recording of an acoustic version of one of my songs every day for the best part of a month.

There are loads of reasons to do this, but mainly it’s about getting the songs out to the wider world. Some of them have never been recorded before, even though they might have been written anything up to 20 years ago, (or even longer in some cases). Others have appeared on different albums I have put together, which have ostensibly been released to the general public, though they haven’t exactly made a splash. If nothing else, they’ll give my family something to play at my funeral should I get run over by the proverbial bus.

Additionally, I want to start gigging, solo stuff, so this pushes me to practice a little, to achieve some competence in accompanying myself as I sing. I’m hoping as the 30 Days progress, there will be a visible improvement in my guitar technique. And hopefully the videos will be something to point to whenever a pub or club booking agent asks for evidence that I’m able to stand up in front of a crowd without embarrassing myself.

I’ve already decided which songs I’m going to do, though I’m not going to list them until they’re online, in case I find I can’t do any given song because I’m not good enough to perform it in one complete take.

I’m going to post the videos on the Mr Clattermonger channel on YouTube, and I’ll blog about them here. I’ve set up a clattermonger Twitter feed, and I’ll tweet about it using the #30songs30days hashtag. So there’s a little exercise in social media here, too – I’m looking for work at the moment, and several of the jobs I am applying for expect a proven record of experience in social media. So this gives me something to point to as an example of projects I’ve worked on.

So this is Day One. The first song is Upside Down, (or Honey, What Is Wrong With Me, depending on what I’m calling it this week). It’s never seen the light of day before. It was written by be. That’s me singing. That’s me playing guitar. No one else is to blame. No one else can take the glory. It’s just me, in all my splendour!