Ryan Woodard 15

@timehaven 

Portland, US   Jan 2006

Artist Bio

Influences:   A painting, an equation, a computer, a girl, a newborn baby, a foreign language, a song and spiral tap pizza.

FAWM for me is a time to make rough sketches that one day might transform into real songs if I explore and practice them for months and years. I do love creating stuff out of thin air (modulo the blatant theft and piracy).

It's been quite a few years since I've done a full FAWM, usually just writing and recording one or a handful of songs each year just to stay in touch. I'm happy I pushed through this year. I was about to drop it because I have better things to do...but then my daughter called me on that and told me I'd better finish or I'd set a horrible example for her. So thank you so much, sweetheart.

I've learned that the songwriting and song-imagining part of my brain is very disconnected from the physical performing part of my brain. The former comes without much pain and I mostly like all my songs as they sound in my head. But the latter...the latter takes so much effort for me to get just to passable, much more to get to musical. For that reason, I consciously decided to avoid the stress and humiliation of making really bad demos just to get them online. Goal number one is to create songs. Goal number two is to figure out how to play, arrange and sing them and, for me, that takes much time.

The other thing I tried to do this year, consciously...was to attempt the classic VerseChorusVCBVC kinda arrangement. I've never set out to do them but it's my form of experimental music. Being tied to a form does free up some cognitive load.

Soundboard