7s7d: D1
“A Way Out”
Prompt: lay back and unwind
Submission of Member: Joe L
Guess what? It's "Seven Songs in Seven Days" time!
In the event you haven’t experienced a 7 Songs in 7 Days before: once each year since 2017 I’ve put what we do here at The Vault (a brand new original song delivered monthly which includes a prompt sourced from a Vault member) on hyperspeed, and I churn out a new song every day for a whole week, with the sprint culminating in an online broadcast where I debut all the songs live in a row exclusively for Vault Members. That was crazy enough to do several years in a row, but then last year I lost my actual mind and thought a great way to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the first “7 Songs in 7 Days” would be to try writing 30 Songs, one for each day of September in 2021. I will likely never do that again, but I am really happy to have done it, since a decent amount of good-to-excellent-works were produced during that sprint.
To make the whole event even more unwieldy for me, I decided to build out and finally launch this newest iteration (The Vault) of what was, for the 6 years prior, my Patreon membership program. This was a huge undertaking and I am still working on getting everything set up how I want it to be for you, but providing an improved experience for you was so important to me that I didn’t want to keep putting it off. So! Bits here and there of The Vault are a tad still under construction…
Like a lot of the vibe for me this past year, this year’s 7 Songs will, I think, be a little quieter than usual, but I'm SUPER grateful to have you here and to celebrate ONE FULL YEAR since the launch of The Vault!
THANK YOU for your help in continuing and for contributing to this huge force/institution/inspiration/outlet for my art. When I really consider who I am as an artist and what I do as a songwriter, The Vault is really the heart of it all. The little space where we can really connect. The little space where I can be completely vulnerable and share, and a space that is safe and where I know I will be heard. The encouragement to keep going, keep trying. The support to experiment and spend time writing. THANK YOU. I don't think I would still be writing and performing if it weren't for this space and everyone who takes part in making it what it is.
I've been a little tired and still trying to recover from The Big Burnout (self-inflicted) that likely really hit its apex during 30 Songs in 30 Days last September, so while I've seen this year's 7s7d challenge approaching, it still came upon me so much faster than I was expecting.
Here's my first offering for this year - featuring a prompt from Joe, and lyrically it's sort of circling around the topic that so so many of my songs have for more than a decade now... how weird it is to try to be a songwriter/creator professionally and how long should one make so many other sacrifices before deciding to make the ultimate sacrifice?
While it's an upbeat samba thing, again sort of in the spirit of one of my biggest musical influences, Kings of Convenience… though there were some moments where I went, “oh, but also like The Police” (kinda, sorta, not really, but you know?). There is also some musical line in here that is reminding me of something else I've written but haven't been able to put my finger on... probably one of you will be able to call it out. (This sort of thing used to bother me, but, you know... I think I'm at Year 20(?) of writing songs and certainly ideas are going to get recycled/repurposed/reused, intentionally or not.)
The lyrics are much too dark to fit into the Lex Land canon as that project currently stands, so I think we have a new One Big Dark Room tune (and it feels a little like "Somewhere Else" Part II). I have some cool ideas for production for this one, but I didn't want to miss my deadline, so I'm hoping to properly record this one tomorrow or in the coming days when I have a little more time.
It was brought to my attention that some of the prompt submission menu links were broken here at The Vault - my apologies and I'll be taking time this week to tune up some things around here I've been meaning to spruce up.
I will for sure need some more prompts in the bucket for our little lotto this week, so, please, don't be shy and throw some into the pile!
Submit a prompt I can include into a song this week (or another time) by clicking here.
rewards access:
