At the beginning of 2021, when I decided to record a song every day, my logic went like this:
I want to get better at playing guitar and singing;
I should practice every day; I would be more motivated to practice every day if I had some commitment to a project;
I have never been good about learning songs and playing them all the way through;
I would be more likely to follow through on practicing and/or learning a whole song every day if I were blogging about it.
So how did it go? I definitely improved when it comes to looking at the chords to a song for the first time and playing it through. I can pick up the guitar and play most vaguely familiar songs without hesitation.
The quality of the songs, my singing, playing, recording, etc. was rather variable. There’s no correlation to time/effort/technology spent in production, either. I learned a lot about how to use Garageband, specifically, and some broad concepts about recording software and gear, but barely scratched the surface, and although I love me some overly complicated multi-track layering with effects, some of the best songs are of course just me and the guitar, recorded with my phone.
Soon, I’m going to curate a little “top 10” or “favorites” list or something and tag them all so they show up on one page here.
Total artists: 219
(There’s some wiggle room here. The “Billy Bragg & Wilco” album is notably different from Wilco, so I separated it. There might be more than one incarnation of “Palace” here. But non-Pavement Malkmus and non-Beatles Lennon and non-Garfunkel Simon are all rightfully separated in the count.)
Most frequent artists:
| Bob Dylan | 11 |
| Wilco | 8 |
| The Band | 7 |
| Leonard Cohen | 7 |
| Johnny Cash | 7 |
| Grateful Dead | 7 |
| REM | 6 |
| Fleet Foxes | 6 |
| Beatles | 6 |
| Arcade Fire | 6 |
Super-interested in the final tally here. My “favorite” bands mostly don’t show up — Stereolab songs required multiple tracks and were challenging to play and sing. The Sea And Cake songs, aside from Parasol, were hard to find any useful chords or tab for, and/or challenging to play. Arcade Fire made the top 10, though and Vampire Weekend is not far behind with 5 songs.
Most surprising here is REM, which factored in later in the year after I listened to a podcast about them and revisited all their albums from when I was paying attention.
Familiarity was the key to the most frequently selected artists, I think, along with “I can sing this Bob Dylan song on the beach house porch with my phone propped up against a beer can” vibes.
Kinda wanna graph the frequency of artist across the whole year here — 61 artists appear twice or more; that leaves a long tail of 158 artists with one song each. OK, I did it.
Gender (for some value of gender):
- Songs: 311 male singers / 54 female singers.
- Artists: 174 male artists / 47 female artists (note, that adds up to 221, because I counted Arcade Fire and Fleetwood Mac twice, depending on who is singing.)
I obviously could’ve done better here. I didn’t like the way the numbers were going, and did 10 straight “female” songs in November.
Decade:
While writing this post, it occurred to me it would be fun to see what time periods I was most fixated on. Having not gathered this data as I went along, this was kinda time consuming! Sure, I know the Poison song is from the 1980s without looking it up, but do you have any idea how many of these songs were just on either side of 1969/1970 or 1989/1990? I actually don’t know, because I didn’t write down the whole year when I just spent hours (over the course of the past week since Jan. 1, at the time of this parenthetical) gathering the decade.
| 1990 | 80 |
| 1970 | 70 |
| 1980 | 66 |
| 1960 | 47 |
| 2000 | 38 |
| 2010 | 36 |
| 1950 | 16 |
| 2020 | 6 |
| 1940 | 3 |
| 1930 | 1 |
| 1920 | 1 |
| 1870 | 1 |
I mean, that tracks. I was a teenager in the 1990s, so they win, every time. The oldest song is “Home On The Range,” which is the 1870 there. The newest? I think I played “Juanita” the week Sturgill Simpson released it.
What else?
What other data should I pull together?
My next post will probably be some sort of top 10 / favorites / to-remix lists.