I Love the Song of the Day

A few days ago I noticed that I’d never selected a set of favorite songs for volume 2.4 of the Song of the Day, a deficiency I needed to rectify since I was nearly done with the posting of volume 2.5, which runs through August 10 of 2007.

I write these lyrics longhand in hardbound blank books: these “volumes” are just the various books.  I give them titles and they have a tendency to develop vague themes but the divisions are basically arbitrary.  I posted a picture of them all a little over 6 years ago: as chance would have it concluding with the (then unfinished) volume that I’m posting right now (ten more volumes have been added since).

Writing “a song a day” seems like an easy hook: but over the years I’ve come to feel that however accessible, the “high concept” is actually a detriment.  There’s too much of it.  As the raw output of an unredacted creative process the quality of a given offering can vary wildly, to say nothing of the content, which more than occasionally veers into the profane, lascivious, solipsistic or (even worse), religious.

Picking favorites out of the volumes is an effort to curate the flood somewhat, though I don’t know that anyone really pays attention to the sidebar.  It’s not a scientific process.  I pick five songs per volume by paging through and sticking a tape flag on whatever grabs me, and when I run out of tape flags halfway through, flipping back and forth between the latest attraction and the songs I’ve already tagged, trying to decide which one I like better.  With a few of the volumes I’ve found myself wondering, well in, if I’ll find 5 decent songs (though it’s never really a problem in the end).

No such problems this volume though - there are tons of songs I feel like were good enough to make the cut, songs like Work Faster, Partisans, Peace, Turning Point, Heat, The Spot, Time Tunnel, and Bridge to Nowhere.  I ended up genuinely mulling back and forth over a few selections in the final list.

And there it is: the truth is that I love the song of the day.  I’m really attached to it.  If I could justify it I suspect I would spend countless hours on this bizarre congregation, transcribing the remaining texts and affixing tags to the backlog of online posts and diagramming the oddball thematic connections that find their way into it all, connections that can only be approximated with searches.

I love it, but what to do with it?  At the end of the day, regardless of whether any of it is good or bad, it’s an incredibly quixotic pursuit.  In this age of Vine, Instagram and Pinterest supplanting Tumblr (by virtue of the latter trending too wordy, presumably), I’m producing verse, stubbornly free of any graphic adornment... And not even “high” verse, I don’t know anything about modern poetry least of all how to emulate it.  What I’m cranking out rather rests firmly in the idiom of the pop lyric, though generally lacking things that make pop lyrics catchy, like choruses, or being about young love.

I don’t know.  I don’t know.  Maybe it’s just there and that’s all there is to it.  I’m no longer sure where I was going with this, and anyway I’m beat and this day’s song was written hours and hours ago.

And tomorrow there'll be two.