One of the things we songwriter folks do is attempt to cause other songwriters to write songs. It’s not enough that we torture ourselves; it seems that we feel a need to torture each other. There’s February Album Writing Month, or the RPM Challenge, or some other form of self-flagellation where you’re supposed to write a certain number of songs in a (preposterously) short amount of time, or things like Song School, where you go to the middle of nowhere and where there’s nothing to do besides write songs (think summer camp, with less short-sheeting of beds and more Milk of Magnesia), or topic albums.
I attempted to contribute to a topic album once. My pals Jon Waterman and Steve Rapson invited me to contribute a song to a holiday compilation of original music, and they should have known better, because I sent them “Shlomo the Dreidel Shark”, and Jon called me up a few days later and told me that he couldn’t put it on the album because he was worried that it cast the Jewish religion in an unflattering light, and the joke’s on them, because Hudson Harding Music, the folks who promoted my brandish newish album “The Great Indoors”, assemble a holiday compilation every year, and last year “Shlomo” was on it, right next to Mark Stepakoff’s now-classic “Leonard Cohen Christmas”, which Mr. Cohen kindly cooperated with by dying.
But truly, my greatest fear is the song prompt.
Here’s how it “works”. Every month, some sadist – er, musician – hosts a session in which he or she invites a few other songwriters to perform with them in the round, and one of the rounds must be a brand new song, written in response to a topic or phrase chosen by the previous session’s audience. Then, at some point in the evening, the host solicits topics or phrases from the audience, pulls them out of a hat, has the audience vote, and the winner is the topic for the next session. It’s musical NASCAR: come for the spectactular crashes, stay for the homemade pastry. What could go wrong?
Here’s what happened the first time I did this: the song prompt I was given was “surrogate mothers for orphaned animals”. You really have to worry about an audience where that topic was not only proposed, but was the most popular topic. Perhaps the runner-up was “porridge”, or “toilet paper rolls I have known”. Now, I happened to hit this one out of the park: I wrote a song called “It’s Not Over Till the Cat Lady Sings”. But it doesn’t make me wince at the process any less wincingly.
The second time I did this, I can’t remember what the prompt was, and my song wasn’t nearly as memorable, but I did end up meeting Kirsten Maxwell, who is the bee’s knees as long as the bee is wearing cat’s pajamas, as far as I’m concerned, and someday I will be the answer to the trivia question “Who is the tallest songwriter ever to share a stage with Grammy Award winner Kirsten Maxwell?” Kirsten finished her song about ten minutes before the show started (actually, for all I know, she was still writing it while I was singing my bridge), and she killed. But, once again, this experience doesn’t make me wince at the process any less wincingly.
And as you’ve probably been able to guess, the third time I did this will be in the past tense on March 9, the day after I songwrite in the round with Rob Siegel and hosts Dan and Faith Senie, who were also responsible for the second time I did this. I haven’t finished the song yet, but I can assure you that the new topic has nothing to do with orphaned animals.