Song writing. Songwriting? Writing songs.

I recently put myself on a songwriting regimen which requires me to write a certain number of songs each month for the next few months. I've got a few friends here in NYC keeping me accountable to make sure I deliver. Physical beatings have been threatened if I don't write.

Additionally, I have to write a song on the theme "snowed in" for a songwriter's series I'm playing in CT next month. My favorite "snow" song is "Valley Winter Song" by Fountains of Wayne. Occasionally those guys are a little too self-consciously poppy for me, but that is one beautiful song, and sometimes I walk around in the New York cold listening to it over and over.

I harbor a secret dread that my best songs are behind me, products of the overwrought emotions of my fleeting youth. A friend of mine recently used the phrase "self-forgetfulness" to describe the perfect state for creation and for life in general, and I believe that is true of my state when I wrote my first songs. I didn't think twice (as I do now) about whether I had the ability or the talent to write good songs . I simply wrote, awkward phrase after awkward phrase, until one day the phrases weren't awkward and the songs worked (although admittedly, some of them worked awkwardly).

The first song I ever wrote, as a kid, while mowing the lawn on a hot southern Saturday, was a pre-adolescent sadist fantasy called "Hop Away Little Frog," in which I warned various forest creatures against the perils of venturing too close to the mower blade, then described in ever-increasing detail the results of what *could* happen:

"Hop away, little frog, thank you, thank you.
Hop away, little frog, so I don't run over you
with the lawnmower that I'm pushing little frog
Hop away, hop away.

If you don't hop away, you might be dead.
This lawnmower blade could chop off your head
Or it might chop off a leg or two
Or it might chop up every part of you.

Hop Away, little frog, thank you, thank you.
Hop away little frog, so I don't run over you
with the lawnmower that I'm pushing little frog
Hop away, hop away."