This is the fuzziest aspect to what is the otherwise bone-headedly simplistic high concept for the projects: write a song a day. I knew at the outset of the first project that if missing a day meant ending the project then it wouldn't last very long. Maybe if making songs and music were the larger part of my life I would be able to keep it continuous except in the condition of extreme duress. But writing song lyrics is something I jam into the interstices of my life and it doesn't take that much for me to miss one. A sufficient disruption of routine can generally do it.
I also knew that if I didn't have to catch up with the missed songs I would very rapidly be working on the "song of the every once and a while" project. I could point you to a number of "I'm going to do X every day, well most days, well pretty regularly, well I haven't done X in 5 months but..." progressions of well-intentioned creators on ye olde internette.
Although some of my favorite songs have certainly been catch-up lyrics, from the project perspective a totally "proper" lyric has to be written on its assigned day. But the only way the project can function (for me) is to allow writing songs on other than the day they were assigned to.
All kinds of hijinks are possible in the context of this single loophole. I could skip a song for six years and write it in. I suppose that if I made some sort of critical tracking error and skipped over a date without properly recording it I would end up doing just that. I could put off writing all week, every week, and jam seven songs in on Sunday. I would be within the letter of the law on the project though clearly in violation of its spirit. That's a funny sort of line to judge. When I wrote the first project I wrote missed songs in red ink - an approach to tracking continuity that was typically literal-minded of me. At some point early in on the second project I decided to stop tracking missed songs completely. Not long after I fell radically behind for a period - weeks, maybe months of songs in arrears. The failure to track continuity may have been a culprit though of course the first-time parent thing probably played a role.
Since I wasn't keeping track I have no idea which songs are which except when some of them reference the situation. I remember clearing the backlog as this Sisyphean task running as an undercurrent in my life, trying to get back onto continuity with the current time line while painfully dragging one tardy lyric after another out of the aether, writing songs backwards from the present and forward from the past and all the time wondering if I could really even stand by the project's central premise any more.
Well, clearly I decided I could... The more this period recedes into the past, the less significant this solitary major deviation from the ideal of a song a day seems in the scope of the overall project. Meanwhile, I started tinkering around with tracking continuity again. My thought was to track just numbers of songs written consecutively and post it weekly - a way of keeping a touchstone with continuity without exactly tracking the provenance of every song as was the case with the red ink paradigm... So I was totting up little hash marks on sticky notes and suchlike but I'd lose track and wonder if I'd missed marking a song I'd written or skipped a day and forgotten to reset the count. I eventually started to grid out what amounted to calendars on the endpapers of the books and without quite seeing it coming I ended exactly tracking the output again and there in the calendar grids a big X for every missed song - back to literal-mindedness again I guess.
What is the song of the day?
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