JDub Records

The Wailing Wall - Everything Around You Turns to Shit

The RPM Challenge is a project that encourages musicians everywhere to create a full-length album (at least 35 minutes or 10 songs) entirely in the month of February. All material must be previously unreleased, and they encourage participants to write all the songs during February as well (no covers are allowed). The idea is not to try and make the most amazing album of all time, just to make an album - it could be anything! It could be 35 minutes of nothing but hand claps! The purpose, according to their mission statement, is to “get busy and stop waiting around for the muse to appear…[because] taking action puts you in a position to get inspired.”

Now, if anybody is a poster child for “waiting around for the muse to appear,” its me. My creative process is probably best explained by Oscar Wilde’s famous quote (I am paraphrasing here), “I worked very hard all day - in the morning, I added a comma, and in the afternoon, I took it back out.” I am a neurotic, a nitpicker, a second-guesser, a perfectionist. I form songs over months and months, adding or subtracting a word or a chord as they come to me; when I sit down with the specific intent of “writing a song” in one sitting, the results are unfailingly pathetic. The idea of writing and recording an album entirely during the month of February could not be any more frightening to me, which is why, this year, I opted not to participate (I told myself over and over that it was because of my busy schedule, but really, who am I kidding?). However, a few of my friends are currently hard at work on their own RPM albums, including Wailing Wall drummer Chris Roush, aka Soul Saint Marie, and Portsmouth, NH’s own Guy Capecelatro III.

Guy in particular is famous for being an alarmingly prolific songwriter within the confines of the RPM challenge - last year, he recorded four full-length albums, and this year, its looking like he might just top it! One of the many projects he’s undertaken this February is an album entitled My Heart Is About To Burst, a collection of songs written around six word stores (that is, a story told in six words - the most famous example being Ernest Hemmingway’s “For sale: baby shoes, never used”). For this project, Guy emailed a very long list of his own six word stories to a large number of his musically-inclined friends (myself included), asking them to pick two and set them to music, with the only restriction being that the songs had to be under three minutes.

One of my submissions, “Everything Around You Turns To Shit,” is included at the top of this post. In the spirit of the RPM Challenge, I tried to knock the song out as quickly as possible. I recorded every instrument and vocal in a single take (regardless of any mistakes or bad notes), and I threw every single idea I had onto the song without second-guessing my decisions. Melodica solo? Check. Advil containers used as maracas? Yup. Sickeningly off-key choral arrangement? Why not!

Is it my best work? Hell no! Not even close! But did I have fun making it? Yeah, I did. And isn’t that really the point?