Well, would you look at that? Almost February this year, and I was getting extremely worried that the FAWM (February Album Writing Month) site wouldn't open up in time... Yikes! That was a close one, because just the day before February is when the site finally swung open its doors and welcomed the eager songwriters that look forward to the event anxiously for a whole year like yours truly. I'm excited for this FAWM, as I always am, and I really think I'm going to write some of my best stuff! My first FAWM was in 2010, where I met the 14 song deadline exactly. My second FAWM in 2011, I achieved 28 songs. Half of the songs didn't get demos recorded, though, just the lyrics written, and a lot of those lyrics have been thrown out since. Last FAWM in 2012, I wrote 18 wonderful songs, I don't believe there was one song written that I don't still play today. Last year was also the first time I did a collaboration for FAWM, my friend and I wrote a song for our band and posted it. So there was only one FAWM that I didn't do more songs than needed, so I hope I keep that up this year! (Knocks on wood) Alright, my game plan: Write some raw punk songs! I want to write some political stuff, some social messages in the lyrics, and just overall attitude that would make Johnny Rotten proud! I'll probably experiment with some lighter stuff, too. I also want to abandon my habit of recording the vocals before I have the melody fully written. I have a tendency to feel out the vocal melody during the recording of my FAWM demos because I'm trying to get the song done quick. This results in out of tune, out of time, and low-quality in overall sound vocals. I've got to learn to know my vocals and know the beat of the melody so that my vocals are stronger. I know they're just demos, but it's hard to demonstrate a good song when the vocals sound like someone just woke up and sang the lyrics without knowing the song well. I also need to preserve my voice during the day better. This is the only part about FAWM I hate: it's in the middle of winter. My throat gets all dry and makes my vocals sound raspy. Luckily, I finally got a humidifier in my room, so that should help out a bit. It's hard to preserve your voice in the winter, so I'm just hoping the humidifier is the answer (in case you're wondering, FAWM isn't the reason I got the humidifier, that was just a bonus. I got the humidifier because my nose gets dry in the winter as well, and many bloody noses occur because of this dryness, so I got sick of it and bought the humidifier to prevent that. So far, it works, knock on wood again.) So that's my blog post about FAWM, if you're a songwriter as well, I hope to see you there, too! The site is fawm.org. Don't go to fawm.com, trust me, I've made that mistake.
-Devin
