Song Submissions
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Cherie Cobbs, Lindstrom, Minn.
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I read the lyrics and was compelled to attempt to put them to music. I thought some of the phrases were pretty complex so I chose to keep the tune simple. It's just me and my guitar.

To start, I just pulled out the chorus, "take one, take two..." and worked from there. My husband Shon helped me with the recording process (even constructed a homemade pop filter for our mic), and then mixed it in our basement.

This project was such a great idea. I can't wait to hear other takes on the song.

Brian DeRemer, Minneapolis
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My friend Mark e-mailed me about four days ago with a link and a message saying "interested?" The other members of my band Mercer are out of town, so I sat down with my four-track recorder and wrote this in one night.

At first I started intensively editing the lyrics while grumbling to myself about how the guy who wrote these words is obviously a poet, not a lyricist. The first version I recorded was something like six minutes long. At a certain point I decided to use the words verbatim, with the idea that THE SONG is the most important part and the words are icing on the cake. I used what I thought were the essential ideas.

I hope this still keeps me within the rules; if it doesn't, I'm still pretty proud of the song. I usually write songs beginning to end (verse, chorus, verse, solo etc.) but this song came out chorus first, which was refreshing. I don't know why, it just happened that way. I've learned not to ask why when it comes to songwriting. You just have to go with the flow.

Dan Duke, St. Paul
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As soon as I heard about this I thought, "Wow, this sounds cool." This is how it went for me.

I read over the lyrics a few times to try to get the mood and feel of them. To me they have a quality of a lazy summer -- nostalgic, not goal-oriented, not really telling a specific story. I noodled around on the piano and came up with a rather aimless chord progression and a lazy melody that spends a lot of time on just a few notes. I wrote it in a couple of days, then started thinking about what sort of treatment and orchestration to give it.

The production seemed to call for a relatively mellow sound, so the drums are not very aggressive and there is no electric guitar. Thanks to the miracle of multi-track recording, I played piano, bass, acoustic guitar, sang the lead and backing vocals, and programmed the drum machine. The tricky thing is that the drum machine has to be programmed and recorded first, as everything else has to be in time with it -- so in effect, I had to hear it in my head as much as possible before recording. Recording and mixing was done in a whirlwind 20 hours or so, so it was good to have the concept in my head first.

The combination of song-writing and production draws from sources as diverse as Coldplay, Ravel's Ondine from Gaspard de la Nuit, Genesis (in the Gabriel years), and I suppose even Nora Jones. My son was reminded of King Crimson. One of my goals whenever I write a song is to avoid boring predictability on the one hand, and a labored complexity on the other.

The lyrics seemed to divide up pretty easily into verse, pre-chorus, chorus and 'post chorus.' The last time though, the area that I considered as the verse was truncated, so I ended up melding the verse and pre-chorus into one unit. Hopefully this is a good thing, as people have a combination of the new and the familiar rather than simple repetition.

At first it was difficult to get a feel of rhythm from the words. There was also the problem of TOO MANY SYLLABLES, i.e. at times lines that seemed to be analogous in the rhyme scheme had a large discrepancy in the number of syllables.

Having to adapt to words that someone else has written forces you to be more creative and adaptable. You can't just say "There are too many syllables; I'll write different words." This made the process an interesting exercise.

Gregg Garvey, Minneapolis
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I wrote the music, played all instruments and produced this recording myself. I decided to take the music in a soft and somewhat psychedelic folk/alt-country direction.

Brack Herfurth, Cincinnati, Ohio
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I recorded the track in my living room studio over the past few days. I wrote, recorded and played all of the instruments on the track. In composing the music for summer lyrics, I thought the chords should be light and uplifting. The lyrics aren't an even meter throughout, so I tried to keep the music simple to avoid the song becoming too complex. I grew up in the Minneapolis area but live in Cincinnati right now. Listen to The Current online regularly. What an awesome idea for songwriters!

Song Submissions
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