About

Making up songs, for fun

“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
– Kurt Vonnegut Jr., here

Hi! I’m a Canadian called Frank who was born in Hungary in 1955. I’m also an occasional songwriter who records his own demos at home. I really enjoy the process of making up a song and then arranging and recording it, whenever time allows, just gradually trying to get it to sound as good as I can.

Inspired by the pros, but definitely not one of them. I’m an amateur, though hopefully in the best sense of that word: someone who does it for the love of doing it.

I recommend it

Playing music, writing songs, and recording them is a tremendous amount of fun, which is a good enough reason for anyone to do it, if you’re so inclined. You certainly don’t have to be in the music business to make music. You don’t even have to be a musician, for that matter.

“… our technology and our economic system seem to produce the present bad situation: millions of people feel themselves poor and powerless; millions feel that music is something to be made only by experts.”
– Pete Seeger, here

Music making vs. music business

If you ever get discouraged comparing your best efforts with any of the polished productions on the radio, consider for example that it took Brian Wilson seven months, 17 separate recording dates at 5 different professional studios, with a full team of LA’s finest studio musicians, to make just one three-and-a-half-minute recording, Good Vibrations, at an estimated cost of more than $400,000 in today’s dollars.

By comparison, you need way less time and money to have all kinds of fun at home just making up new songs and learning new skills. And in the process, you’ve created something from scratch that didn’t exist in the world before. It may not be the masterpiece that Good Vibrations is (yet), but if you’re not relying on it for a living, you can just enjoy the process. “Fun” sounds trivial, but it really isn’t.

It doesn’t have to be popular to be worth doing

The advantage of making something for the sheer fun of it is that if you like making it, it doesn’t matter how your art compares, who likes it, or whether it sells. What matters is only whether you like it.

“Art is not a horse race”
– Pete Seeger, here

“I never wrote for [critics] then, I don’t write for them now. I have no interest in what they have to say about anything. I’m interested in whether I like it. I write for me.”
– Lou Reed, here

“Make original material. Make what you like. Stick to it, and just do it for fun. If you don’t like it, nobody else is gonna like it. If you like it, probably other people will like it too.”
– Michael Hurley at age 79, here