And now for something not-so-completely different! At least not too different from something similar that’s happened in the past. To wit, some months back on my Tumblr blog I said this:
“One of these days I’m gonna spin up a blog where all I do is post about my songs and/or lifelong hobby of amateur musicianship and it’ll be so self-centered and doxx me so thoroughly that there’s no way anyone would ever read or follow for an extended time period. But as I often say to myself, if I don’t tell my own story, then who the hell will?”
And so ye olde “30 Songs” has staggered back to life after about 15 years, but on Tumblr. The stuff I showcase there will be Very Amateur; my second band only had one real studio album (of which we were rightly proud), but before that there was a whole lotta ignorant mucking around. However, I’m all about cumulative achievements, so the early cringey stuff validates the later good stuff. At least that’s what I tell myself on nights like these when I binge heaping helpings of it.
I did this before on an old Blogspot site circa 2011, when I literally only had 30 songs, and some of that stuff will be recycled/remastered/repackaged. That blog was based on another one by one of my songwriting heroes, David Lowery of Cracker and Camper van Beethoven, who had this to say when beginning his own 300 Songs blog in 2010:
“Over the course of my career as a singer-songwriter-musician-producer I estimate i’ve written, recorded and produced 300+ songs. I often get asked questions about different songs. I sometimes enjoy answering them but most of the time I don’t do a very good job of it. i’m really pretty anti-social. I can’t really help it. I think I was just born this way. So I came up with this idea to randomly select a hundred or so songs and write a few comments about each of the songs, like: with whom I recorded, what the song is about, or simply something funny or interesting that happened in the session. Nothing too in depth. Sometimes i’ll also provide the lyrics and basic guitar chords for the fans who like that sort of thing.”
I want to do something like that—i.e. someone else’s idea executed less well and at a fraction of the original’s quantity and quality. For my ~30 years of Amateur Rock Obscurity in two bands (with one of those band actually being three bands) and several solo projects, the number is much closer to a mere 50 songs than 300—which is nice, because that makes it manageable and finite. Also, I’ll turn 50 years old near the end of 2026, so this will be a fun and hopefully validating way to climb that particular hill.
For about half these songs, I wrote lyrics more often than lyrics and music, so I’ll try to describe the song as a whole more than as a musical composition. Or maybe I’ll just go off on random tangents that you’ll have to grin and bear, because you’ll like reading this crap, right? Surely.
Further, I liked the non-chronological approach Lowery took with his stuff, so I’m doing that too, but instead of some intricate mathematical formula, I’ll just write about whatever song I feel like writing about (and maybe syndicate/queue here and there).
The randomly-shuffleized series will begin next Monday, 11/17/25. Mp3/Youtube links and lyrics will be handily provided, but I’m not bothering with tablature or chords because, well, I’m a bass player, and we can be dumb like that. So there.
As a preview, if you can stand the sound of a middle-aged man talking about himself, get a preview of (most of) what I’ll cover via a one-off podcast I made in 2021 during late quarantine as something to do (the link goes to Bandcamp).
So, stay tuned to 50 Songs here and thanks for listening.
