September Songs

Blame Indigo Bunting. It’s all her fault. OK, you can blame it on Elvis Costello instead, if you want. He wrote, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture — it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.”

So, just to prove his point, one dear creative soul, Lisa Otter, started a blog project called Dancing about Architecture, and now a whole bunch of people are writing about their favorite songs, mostly one every day. (My friend Indigo Bunting was the one who told me about it, which is why it’s actually all her fault.)

Me, I don’t have that kind of stamina. I blogged every day for a the better part of a year with my 50 Words, 210 People project. It was a nifty writing experiment, now completed, in which I wrote exactly fifty words a day about 210 different people who had touched my life in some way. It was fun, but exhausting.

So I’m not officially joining that august group of daily song bloggers, but will emulate them by writing about the music that has meant the most to me, one post per day, for one month — September. (Get it? “Not august”? September?)

Tomorrow is September 1, and the first post will be online by 5:30 a.m. EDT. Please visit my new (but short-term) blog, September Songs, for some nifty musical history and, I hope, a bit of serious fun. (I’ll still be writing this one as well during the month of September, so don’t worry.)

Each post will have at least one YouTube video (most will have a whole bunch of them), and many will have lyrics. I’ll often have two versions of the same song, or a couple of songs that are related to one another somehow. And if I can pull it off, I hope each day’s song will be linked in some way to the previous day’s. We’ll see.

I don’t have time for this, I really don’t. Damn that Indigo Bunting.