So, it’s the last day of the month and time to take a look back at this semi-successful Song of the Day project.
Posts: 24
Days of month: 31
The idea was to create my own writing exercise, giving myself something fixed to write about — songs — so that I would get in the habit of posting regularly. It worked fairly well until the Christmas holidays, when two weeks of travel and constant company made it harder to find time and, mostly, the right headspace to muse. I’ll continue with the occasional Song of the Day post, but since it has served its purpose of encouraging me to write, will remove the constrains of the exercise and expand the scope of posts as well.
What I’ve learned:
– it’s hard to write every day (but I already knew this). Need at least one break day a week.
– it feels natural to write in the first person on a blog, and fairly awkward to write in any other voice.
– there is a recording of everything you can think of on YouTube and Vimeo. I hadn’t fully appreciated the scope.
– a vacation might be a great time to write, but vacation with 10 family members and/or with 9 friends and their five children is not that vacation.
It’s the end of 2013, which was superior in every way to 2012, so my hopes for 2014 are high. I’ve already posted a DDT song once this month, but today’s song is called “That’s all” and that’s the right way to end this month of songs. I was in St. Petersburg this summer, and it made me happy to hear a busker playing this within the first few hours of arrival.
For the most part, I could only find concert versions of the song (a notable exception: a very weird orchestral performance celebrating the 10th year of the Russian Kultura channel, worth viewing because of the intense plastic oddness of the audience), so here’s one. There are some poetic Russian verses in between, but if you want to join in the singalong yourself, the chorus is:
Eta vsyo, shto ostanyetsya poslye menya
Eta vsyo, shto vozmu ya s saboy
That’s all that will remain after me/
That’s all that I’ll take with me.
Happy new year!