Six years ago, I started a songwriting group with musician friends in New York. The rules were simple:
Each Thursday, upload a brand new song to our private SoundCloud.
Listen and provide feedback to everyone’s songs.
If you miss the deadline, you’re out.
This little challenge changed everything for me. While I don’t necessarily take pleasure in sharing old demos from 2017, today’s song “Be There” was selected specifically for the purpose of reflecting back on that time and the songwriter I was (or wasn’t) and how writing a minimum of one song per week over the past six years has literally changed my life.
Listen to “Be There” (demo):
This song was written on August 10, 2017
◇ Upcoming Shows ◇
Tomorrow, July 6th, I’ll be performing at Le Consulat in Paris, France. The show is “prix libre” or pay what you want and featuring two other great acts: Edouard Bielle and Retriever. RSVP here. If you can’t make it, I’ll also be doing an intimate set at Zak Bar on July 20th. See you there?
Puke Ellington is born
In July 2017, some friends of mine proposed the idea of starting a songwriting group: a place to hold each other accountable to a consistent writing schedule as well as to better our crafts by giving and receiving constructive feedback.
The group was called Puke Ellington, and we soon began “puking” out weekly demos to share amongst ourselves. Some of the early members included: Michael Tarnofsky, Sam Sodomsky, Leah Lavigne, Mark Bucci, Joe Vilardi, Cory Sterling, Sho Ishikura, Will Lowry, Adrien Sheldon-Peter, Desmond Myers, Waylen Roche, Drew Hart, Diego Clare, Gabriella Chavez, Nick LaFalce, Ryan Cole, and many more. While we’ve had phases of five to ten to fifteen members at a time, we’re now down to two. I’m proud to say that I’ve never missed a week since our founding.
When we started, I already had a good ten years under my belt of playing in bands, touring, recording, and declaring myself a "songwriter." However, the reality was that for much of that time, I had very little command over my craft and would probably write only a handful of songs per year. More precisely, two years prior to starting the group, I had begun pushing myself to write around 4-5 songs per week to remedy this shortcoming. But without clear deadlines or structure, I would find excuses to let days or weeks slide. Here's a screenshot of a partial list of songs I've been collecting since 2015:
I keep notes on each song in the individual year tabs below, such as the date it was written, the key, and anything else that will help me revisit them at some point later. I also demo each song so that I can easily share them with collaborators (or you), or at the very least, have proper documentation of what I've written. I have yet to top my best year—2021—with 82 songs written, but I'm not sure that I want to either.
I’ve always been enamored with the catalogs and legacies of songwriters like Carole King, Prince, Burt Bacharach, or more recent greats like Tobias Jesso Jr., who churned out decades of songs for themselves and others. I’m endlessly inspired by late era gems like Bob Dylan’s “Make You Feel My Love,” which arrived three decades into his career and soon after became a standard of the American songbook, performed by Adele and many more.
Although I’ll always produce albums and continue to build out my release catalog, it’s the day-to-day quest of “catching the big fish,” as David Lynch puts it, that has me in it for the long haul. Song by song, I learn a bit more about the craft and my particular sensibilities, and what exactly I can bring to the table to push music forward even 0.05%.
My own idea of quality
These past six years have reshaped my life. Having grown up playing in bands, I was much more collaborative, focused on performance, and not a self-sufficient artist. As my passion for songwriting grew, I taught myself guitar and piano, as well as other instruments like bass, drums, and how to produce. I simply couldn't wait to meet a friend or bandmate to make music.
The early days were spent shutting down ideas that I deemed uncool or not up to the standard I hoped to write. As I got better, I learned to finish my ideas, to write the bad songs—like exorcising a demon—and discovered that it was actually within my power to mold them into something I considered good. After adopting a consistent writing schedule, I've now accumulated years of music that reflects the many different seasons, moods, places, pandemics, travels, and inspirations I've been sponging up while making them.
When listening back, I can see the impact of a two-month depression on my writing. I can also hear bursts of energetic output where I'd written songs every single day that ended up being some of my favorite material. Monitoring these phases has been incredibly insightful, but more importantly, forcing myself to write even on the hardest days—days spent in the airport producing on my iPhone or writing against a 30-minute timer while bedridden with the flu—has taught me that we never know when good ideas, melodies, or lyrics will arrive.
Yesterday, I stumbled upon a new piece by
called On searching for your own idea of quality, in which he cites a Sarah Manguso quote from her book 300 Arguments:The trouble with setting goals is that you’re constantly working toward what you used to want.
I was immediately taken aback by this sentiment because lately, I've been walking around questioning the core principles of my process and how to proceed with my writing goals. On the one hand, my growing catalog of songs is literally my proudest life achievement. On the other, I'm beginning to wrestle with the idea that I may, at times, be neglecting quality for the pursuit of an obsessive goal.
Mason’s own book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work also had an impact on me when I originally read it during Covid-19 lockdown. After going over the daily routines of everyone from Warhol to Angelou to Satie, my major takeaway was that most of these artists did not toil away at their work for 12 hours a day but rather would work in strictly scheduled, hyper-focused blocks of three to six hours a day on average.
This is, of course, not true across all 161 featured artists, but I also suspect that, like many of us in the early years of developing our respective crafts, artists need to put in the hours to arrive at such adapted work flows later on. In any case, I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only did many of the greats share a tendency toward morning routines (my preferred time frame), but it also inspired me to start prioritizing shorter windows of focused work as opposed to my amateur, workaholic inclinations of years past (he types at hour twelve of the workday).
Organizing an accident
As I’ve expressed on my about page on Substack, the motivating factor for starting this newsletter was not only to publicly air out all the music that's been clogging my hard drive but also to explore themes of creativity, musicality, and the artist's journey through essay writing. After only three months, I've only turned over a few stones, but, as with the past six years of a devout songwriting practice, I'm confident that by simply showing up, by putting on my suit and tie each day, the greater meaning will begin to reveal itself.
Any artist that has taken a larger project over the finish line, i.e., a novel, a film, or an album, knows that much of the journey is shrouded in doubt and likely even alternative motives. The work slowly unveils to us what it is we're actually making and, if we're open to receiving such a sign, the result is most likely more honest and original than what we'd sought out to do in the first place. ◍
From the vault
What I’m listening to this week
Upcoming Show Dates
You can always pay a visit to my previous demos and writing via the Substack archive + find my official music releases on Spotify, Apple, or your platform of choice. Stalk me across socials at @thisryanegan.
Thanks for being here,
Ryan
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PUKE FOREVER
needed this today
Much love, beaucoup de bisous
Ryan, damn. I need to up my game. This is remarkable. What an incredible achievement to have written so many songs - and it’s true what you say here about the process. This is so inspiring! I also love spreadsheets.