This podcast has an interview with Burr Settles, the founding FAWMer and programmer who developed the FAWM.org website. George Slade also calls in near the end. We played the song “Talking in Code” from FAWM 2008 by Burr and Isaac Quatorze.
I found an online AI tool to convert the podcast into text, so I’ve pasted that transcript below. It’s not 100% accurate, but it’s pretty cool. I fixed a few things, but I’m sure there are still some oddities. Enjoy.
Transcript:
Blog Talk Radio. Hey, everybody. It’s Charlie Cheney. Welcome to Charlie Cheney’s music exam. We’ve got a special pre FAWM kickoff broadcast today, and I’m very excited that Burr Settles, one of the founding founding FAWMers, will be calling in today and talking about FAWM with us, which is very cool.
I hope you will call in as well. Today is Saturday, January 31st. FAWM is set to start hours from now, so I’m very, very excited. This is my 3rd FAWM, and we’ve been having broadcasts the last couple nights as kind of a preparation for broadcast for the next month. I’m gonna try and do a radio show every day, 10 PM weeknights and 2 PM weekends.
And I’m gonna travel the US doing it too, which is pretty cool. So I hope you’ll tune in as often as you can and call in as well. As I mentioned today, we’re gonna have Burr Settles on the line. He’s gonna call in in a little bit. I’ve got a song lined up that Burr did last year during fall, and it was a collaboration song with Isaac Quatorze.
I wanted to play that just to sort of highlight how collaborative FAWM has gotten in the last couple of years. There’s a lot of co writing going on, people writing lyrics and asking other people to do music for it and people doing music and asking other people to do lyrics for it and doing complete collaborations both ways. It’s been really cool, very collaborative, and a cool environment. I got to write a song with Burr last year as well. I did about 7 cowrites last year.
In any case, I wanted to do this song because I’m gonna ask Burr some questions today about how he rewrote the website and launched a completely new website for Foam this year. And this I thought was appropriate. This is a song called Talking in Code.
SONG: 3:10: TALKING IN CODE – Burr Settles and Isaac Quatorze
Burr is on the line. Hold on, Burr. I’ve got you live. Yeah. There it is, Talking in Code from last year’s form, and Burr is on the line. He was waiting patiently for his song to end. Welcome, Burr.
Thank you, Charlie. How are you today, I’m doing alright. Been a busy morning. Lot of grocery shopping. You gotta eat.
That’s right. We have to stock up so that we remember to eat since we probably won’t be sleeping for the next month. Some some FAWM burgers and, and, and the like. Cool. FAWM shake.
Well, I’ve got a a a what shake? A FAWM shake. A FAWM shake? Awesome. I’m not exactly sure what’s in it, but I plan to find out.
Something high protein for the long with your knife. Right. Right. Well, I’ve got a bunch of questions I wanted to ask you today. I want to ask you about your redevelopment efforts, your 15 day redevelopment effort of the FAWM site for 1.
I’d also like to ask you about the sort of the camaraderie and the cool what I think is one of the coolest parts of FAWM, just the camaraderie of all the people who are involved and when they come back, we’re all sort of shaking hands in the virtual sense and slapping people on the back and stuff. It’s very cool camaraderie thing. There was one other thing I wanted to ask you about too, but why don’t we start with, since in honor of the talking in code song, why don’t we talk about the rewrite a little bit? Can you share with us about your 15 day odyssey? Yeah.
Well, for for those who don’t know, I, for the last several years, I’ve been a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, and I just, at at the end of last year, kind of November December, I was in November, I was writing my final thesis document, which is like a 200 page book basically of all the research I did, and then I defended it and got my PhD. And usually, I spend November December tweaking the website and getting it ready for launch in early January, but that obviously wasn’t a function this year. Right. Because I had my hands full elsewhere. And I I knew from some of the bugs, that the the website was running off of basically a modified version of WordPress, which is an open source blogging tool that I had built a new forum module into and modified the blogs to be song posts and comments and so on and so forth.
And so, but it was so just bloated and slow for the amount of traffic that the website was getting. I just knew it wasn’t gonna hold up for this year. So the participation roughly doubles every year. And so I knew it had to be rewritten from scratch. And I I don’t wanna sound like, you know, I started with absolutely nothing on January 10th.
I had spent a little bit of time in back in September or October laying some of the groundwork for a framework that I built the website in. But, yeah, it was, like, 14,000 lines of code and no. Not that much, but several thousand lines of of code written in about 15 days. Yeah. Wow.
So I tried it on January 12th, actually. How big time? The journal. I kept the journal, of all the different things that I did on each day. So and, of course, you were part of I did some beta testing prelaunch on the 22nd and there were about a dozen FAWMers that helped find some bugs before we launched for real and you were one of those and you were really good at breaking it.
I can break things but good. It was fun to see it happen. I mean, it was great to be able to be involved, I’m telling you. So thank you very much for letting me see it before everybody else. It was so funny because I’d go to bed at night and I usually like I’m on Twitter and so I tweet something that, what are you doing right now?
And I was always afraid to say anything about it, but I was so excited about it. So I’d like, I’d write something that was kind of obtuse that I was sort of testing it, but I didn’t want to say what I was testing and stuff because I didn’t want to tell people it was running and blah, blah, blah. But it was really fun to be involved. And it looks great. And from the forum, everyone is there’s been so much activity since it launched.
Right. And it’s been pretty universal. People are pretty excited about it. I mean there’s been some little some bugs that we didn’t catch in the elephant. Yes.
And there’s tons of features that I think people will come to expect like Inforum websites that, you know, I just didn’t have time to implement, from scratch. For a while there, I was gonna use an open source forum called punbb, for the forum and then just try to hook everything else into that. But I spent about a day and a half trying to get that to work, and there were we wouldn’t have been able to do things like show the donor icons in the forums. And Right. And and just what I would have had to do to make that happen, and the the amount of hours that I had to put into it, I could just rewrite the form from scratch.
So that’s what I did. Right. Yeah. The Rock Hands. Right?
Yep. Yep. The Rock Hands. Yeah. The Rock Hands.
Yes. Rock. Rock. Well, cool. Well, we’re all really excited.
I think I can speak for most people. I probably shouldn’t do that officially, but this has been I’ve been really, really pleased and it’s just the speed alone is really remarkable how much faster it is. So you must have really stripped down the code quite a bit. So, yeah, for those of you who’ve never this is your first FAWM experience, the the website is way faster. It used to be quite a bit slower.
And, actually, like, the amount of, it’s about a tenth the size, like, the actual code base of the actual files that are on the server to run the website. It’s about about a 10th the size. So super lightweight, super fast, a lot more features. And, and, you know, in years past, people have been requesting lots of of new features, and I was reluctant to to put the effort into adding them in the old setup, because I knew that I I wanted to do this rewrite anyway, and, I would’ve just been kinda wasting my time at that point. But now that now that things are rewritten, hopefully it will be easier to answer some of those requests.
Well, one of the things that you put in this year that is very cool is you’ve got the collaboration pop up list when you’re entering a song and people probably haven’t seen this yet since we can’t enter songs yet, but when Yeah. People won’t be able to see that until, what, about, like, 17, 18 hours or something when the site unlocks. I’m never I’m never sure of the official start time, but okay. $17 is good. I don’t know.
It’s midnight at the international date line, which is like Samoa time or something. It’s basically as long as it once it’s February everywhere in the world. Once that happens, then you’re allowed to start posting songs. And then it goes until once it’s no longer February somewhere in the world. Right.
So Yeah. I’ve used that no longer February somewhere in the world both years to run probably officially late on my side because I end up staying up all night on the last night and writing like a dozen songs or something because I get so wrapped up in the last day. I don’t know why I get so cranked up in the last day, but I’ve definitely used that extra time for each of the times I’ve done the challenge for sure. But I wanted to mention that you go ahead. In 2007, I think I had finished all 14 songs before the official stop time.
And then I don’t remember which day of the week it was, but I just didn’t have anything else going on the next day. And I woke up, and there were still 5 hours. I wrote 3 little songs. Just going to last 5 hours before things locked down. Got it.
What I was bringing up is, yeah, that you’ve got this little collaboration tab now where we’re actually able to select a name of another FAWMer from our watch list, our favorited watch list of FAWMers, and it will apply their name to the song that we have collaborated on with them. Boy, that was the backwards way of saying it, but that’s going to be very cool that we’ll be able to post one song and they’ll automatically post on someone else’s profile as a song that they wrote. Is that right? That’s right. So we started seeing a lot more collaborations in 2007 and then last year, it really came in.
We had there were like 200 songs posted that were collaborations. Now the problem is a lot of those were doubly posted. If 2 people co wrote a song, then they would both post it so that they both got credit. And so maybe there were only a 100 songs, but there were 200 that were posted, if that makes sense. So, I just I added a feature so that, if 2 people collaborate on a song, then one of them can post it and add the other one as the collaborator, and then they both get credit for it.
It shows up on both of their profiles. There are links to both of their their former pages from the song page, so when people are listening to it, you know, they they see that both people were responsible. At this point, it will only work for a collaboration of 2. I know sometimes, you know, 3 or 4 people will collaborate on the following. For those cases, you’ll still have to post multiple times for everybody to get the credit, but in the future, hopefully, though, it’ll be set up so that you can have an arbitrary number of collaborators, which could be monstrous.
Right. Right. Because I know sometimes like these exquisite corpse songs, you have a dozen people and each write one minute or, like, 30 seconds of the song, and then you end up with a 6 minute medley on a theme. So those are always exciting and and be a little difficult to do, in the current framework. But That’s cool.
I’m sure it’s going to handle 90% of the things and we’ll work out the rest. Being a systems software developer as well, one of the things that I always laugh about, I read this one book called Systemantics and it has all these rules of systems and one of the universal rules is that systems will expand until they envelop the known universe. So there’s always another feature you’ll be able to add next year, Bert. That’s true. So, well, I wanted to yeah.
I was kinda using the collaboration tool, the new collaborate collaboration tool as a segue into talking about, your last song that we I just played. I played Talking in Code that you did last year in collaboration with Isaac Quatorze. And Yeah. The the whole act of collaboration has really kinda taken off, it feels like, in the last couple of years. And then you were kind enough to let us use the old FAWM framework during 5090 over the summer, and it felt like during 5090 that it took off even more and became almost the dominant way of writing songs.
Yeah. I wasn’t, I wasn’t around most of 5090 obviously because I was I was, you know, trying to finish up the PhD, so I didn’t take on that challenge. But I, as an observer, that was also the sense that I got that there was a whole lot of collaboration going on. And in a whole lot of collaborations, you know, long distance over the Internet collaborations as opposed to, you know, FAWMers who maybe live in the same town, you know, it’s easy to go over to another’s house on a Saturday afternoon and and pound out a couple of songs, but, people are very resourceful and and creative in figuring out how they can use email and Skype and and these other sorts of resources to actually collaborate on some Wikis even, you know, to write songs together. Yeah.
When I, was first drafted into FAWM 2007, which was my first one, I I’m originally from Madison, Wisconsin where Burr lives. Everyone was listening. And I came over there because my parents still live there even though I live in Michigan now. And I came over to Madison and hung out, and the person who recruited me one of the people who recruited me was Nancy Rost, who is kind of the a wonderful personality on the FAWM boards and a wonderful lyricist and songwriter and a great collaborator. And sure enough, we did a co write early in February, like February 1st or 2nd or 3rd or something in in 2007.
And I remember you coming on and asking, how did you guys do this? You know, you’re in different states, And at that point, I was like, oh, no. I came over. We did it in the same room. But very shortly after that, we started to do things over Myspace and sending lyrics back and forth.
And then I did a collaboration that year with Becca Palm, another FAWMer out in the Seattle area, and all I did was send her lyrics. And she did all the music, and it was just awesome. So it was a totally different form of collaboration. Yeah. Becca has been on the team’s collaboration too.
I think, you know, that that story I think there have been several people who have sent her set of lyrics, and then she’s she’s set it to music. And there are other, you know, FAWMers who’s who’s been that that way as well. Nancy and I have collaborated on a bunch of stuff. We’ve we’ve had a trend of doing a French hip hop song for the last 2 years. I’ll see if the trends are continued.
Very cool. Yeah. And then, you know, last year was even different for me. You, I was in a state of funk in the middle of the month. It was like right around Valentine’s Day, and I was just completely depressed because I felt like I’d lost all sense of writing and had no ideas left, and I was freaking out on the forums.
And all of a sudden, you emailed me, and you’re like, get on Skype right now. And I’m like, what? What? What did I do? You know?
And I got a I called you on Skype, and and you’re like, let’s write a song. And and so then we proceeded to try and write a song over video Skype, which, I had never done before. I mean, I had to use video at all. I had to plug in my old 6 year old digital video camera and try and make that work at the webcam and stuff. It was like, just a ridiculous way of trying to do video sharing over the web.
I thought I you I didn’t really have the technology together. I’ve got a webcam this year, by the way. Well, it’s the first time I ever great. We ended up writing a song then too. So there’s been a lot of different ways to do the collabs for sure.
That was the first time I had ever done anything like that as well. And and the funny thing is because I have a a little USB recording interface, I was actually able to set that as the audio input for Skype so that, you know, I just put my head headphones on and could play my guitar and sing into the mic, and you heard that as opposed to, you know, something that was being picked up by my built in laptop microphone. It, you know, it took us we we probably spent we were probably on Skype, what, maybe maybe an hour and a half, and we spent an hour of that just trying to get set up and then a half Yeah. Yeah. The tech tech work knowledge it was pretty rough.
But it was it was a cool experiment. It was a very cool experiment. Yeah. So And and the way the Talking In Code came together was I I pretty much had, that was the song that Charlie played earlier for anybody who just tuned in. That was a collaboration with Isaac Quatorze from Winnipeg.
And I I had this riff, and I had recorded the song, and I had the chorus, and just the verses were not coming to me. It was it wasn’t the sort of song that I had ever written a melody over before. And I was trying to think of, you know, somebody else on FAWM who could probably do something with this. And and the the tone of the song just said Isaac Couture is on it and the the, you know, he he always writes very clever melodies, so I I I hopped on I chat just to see if he was he was on I’m and he was. And so I I said, hey, dude.
You wanna and at that point, I think he’d only posted 2 or 3 songs to the website. He he wasn’t even sure. And he was sort of behind schedule too. And and so I I just burned a little m p 3 to it and sent it to him, and within an hour, he had recorded some vocals over top of it and sent it back. And and I loved it until we posted it.
Yeah. It was very cool. I I really like that song. And that was one of your you you do some interesting stuff in each of these challenges. Like, last year, you imposed upon yourself the fact that you couldn’t use acoustic guitar.
Is that right? That’s right. I typically for for performers who’ve been around for a long time know that I’m kind of a most of the stuff I write is sort of finger picky acoustic Elliott Smith ish, you know, folk rock, I don’t know, in in that vein. Mhmm. And I do 90% of my songwriting on an acoustic guitar, and so I just was curious to see what would happen if I completely banned myself from it.
I didn’t necessarily mean I had to use electric guitar. Right. Even though I did most of the time, it just meant that I couldn’t use the acoustic. So sometimes I use the mandolin, sometimes I I just used midi, synthesizers in in the computer. And and it was I I don’t know if it was an entirely successful experiment.
I think there were a few gems that came out of it, but it was good to jog myself a little bit. Right. Right. Well, that’s just the segue I wanted. I’m going to play another song of yours, which was one of my personal favorites of all of them last year.
So I’m gonna put you on hold for a second here, Burr. And this is a song by Burr from FAWM last year, and it’s called Shatter Me. Indecision because it isn’t my choice. And tender knees are taking their toll. And that was Shatter Me by Birger Settles from the fall 2,008.
And, one thing that was interesting about that song for me is, well, Burr, if you can tell me, sort of why you wrote that song, that that’d be great if you could share that. Well, I think, that song illustrates another really cool thing that happens during February with the Phong community is that song was actually a response to a song that somebody else wrote. So, you know, throughout the month as people write songs and they post the demos and people give feedback, you know, some of the songs are are really moving, which of course is what we’re striving to do when we’re writing these is we’re trying to get in the habit of writing songs, seeing everything as a possibility for a song, and then and and hoping to move other people, when we put them out there. So Steve Steven Leslie Giles, who goes by Steve Applehead on the Palm site, he posted this song. I believe I believe it was called Thankful Mhmm.
That he wrote. And, you know, Steve was new last year. I didn’t really know him. And it was, you know, it it was without going too much into it, you know, it was a song that struck a chord with me, but it was, like, a song that struck a chord with a me of, like, 5 years ago because I was just so, in some ways, I had become maybe a bit spiritually jaded. And so that the Shatter Me was sort of like this response Mhmm.
Mhmm. To to to Steven’s song. Yeah. So and Steven. Sorry.
Go ahead. Well, I I was just gonna say that that happens quite a bit on FAWM. Somebody will post a song which inspires somebody else then to write a response. And it doesn’t by a response, I don’t mean there’s nothing in Shatter Me that quotes or references Steven’s song at all. But it’s a song that I could have only written in that moment, I think.
Right. Right. That’s yeah. That’s exactly it. That’s I love that part of FAWM.
I think that is so completely it. The when you’re in the environment and in the community and you’re listening to other people’s songs and you get to comment on their songs and and just and you hear them at almost the moment of inception. That is so exciting to me, and it totally inspires me to write. I think that’s that’s one of the reasons that I just am absolutely infatuated with FAWM. I I love it.
You know? So I did the same thing. One of my last songs last year was a a song that was actually in response to a bunch of songs that had a lot of spiritual qualities for them, and this was one of them. This Shatter Me was one of them, and and Steven’s thankful. And then when Jonathan Spottiswoode would have written some really cool Oh, right.
Numbers last year that he posted that were really heartfelt, emotional, spiritual songs. And, Emily Shore also had posted some really cool stuff, and and I wrote a song called Star of a Fish that is completely unlike anything I play or had played in the past, but it was but it’s one of my more emotional songs, and I’ve been playing it live ever since. For example, last night, I did a open mic. I do one open mic every pretty much every Friday night that I just really, really enjoy, and a lot of people get up and play together there. It’s very collaborative.
And I played 4 FAWM songs last night, and I didn’t even know it until after the show was over. I started to think back after my set, and I had played 4 songs from last year’s FAWM that I had written in February, and one of them was Star of a Fish, which has become a favorite, of audiences listening to my stuff live. I’ve gotten really, really good response to that song, and I really think that was a direct result of just listening to other people’s stuff during phong. So very cool. Hey.
We’ve got 10 minutes left. People, anyone who’s listening, feel free to call in and ask Burr some questions if you want. You can call in on any regular phone at 914 338-0421. Again, the number is 914-338-0421, and I’ll bring you on to the air, and we can ask for some questions or just talk. These shows are always way cooler if people call in.
It’s fun when you have 4 or 5 people on the line and we can get a big discussion going. I started doing these shows back during 5090 is when I discovered this website during the 5090 Challenge. And we had we had the funnest shows. At the end of 5090, we ended up doing a show that was 2 hours long. And Hoopshank called in from the UK on Skype, and then a bunch of people called Hoopshank on Skype so that they had, like, their own conference call as one caller in.
So it’d be, like, Nancy Rost and Helen’s Evil Twin and Dan Walbank and Hoopshank all on one Skype call calling into the number and then talking with me online, and it was it was just a fun party thing. So that’s where I first found out about doing Blog Talk Radio. And as we started to do it, I realized that I really wanted to do it live, during FAWM. And and possibly if I could do it every day, I’m gonna try and do it every day, which you have told me is crazy. Thank you, Burr.
Yep. That’s insane. That’s even crazier than trying to write an album in a month. I was trying to write an album in a month and do a nightly radio show about people writing an album in a month. Yeah.
I I think you’re right, but it’s I don’t know. It’s not the same. I mean, the I think the hardest part in well, I don’t know for sure because I haven’t actually been able to do it yet, but I think the hardest part is going to be listening to the music during the day to find the songs, those jewels that you find when you’re just kind of surfing around listening to random songs of people that you don’t necessarily know or, you know, weren’t in previous forms or maybe were in previous forms, but you didn’t hear any other stuff. And then all of a sudden, you stumble upon one of these incredible songs and you go, oh, man. And it touches you, like you said, it you know, on some emotional level, and you’re, like, start running around.
I I would do this. I would start running around on the forums saying, has anyone heard this song yet? You know? And I and I post the link so that everyone can click through, and then we start having discussions about it. And I think that’s what I’m kinda most concerned about is just the time to to go listening, but I’m committed.
I’m I’m very committed to it this year. Well, now We got another caller. Let me bring on the other caller. It’s a 601 area code. Is that is that PJ?
601 is Mississippi. Mississippi. Is this George? Mississippi. It is George.
What’s up? Hello? George Slade, our resident our resident wrapper from 5090. And this is your first form. Isn’t that right, George?
It is. Looking forward to it. Can’t wait. It’s like Christmas Eve. Very, very cool.
We’ve always had a a kind of a shortage of rappers, in my opinion, so on FAWM. So I’m excited that you’re gonna be on it this year. Yeah. I’m I’m excited to hear too. I’ve been looking forward to it.
Of course, you everyone knows my brother got me into it, and, I’ve been waiting since last March for. So 5090 might warm up. Right. Yeah. The the death march warm up for me.
5090 is what killed me, but It was rough. Did really well. It it it’s it’s harder than it looks. Yeah. It wasn’t easy by any means.
Now your brother tell tell us who your brother is, George, just so everyone else knows who’s looking in. Mal. Everybody knows Mal. He’s up in Missouri. Okay.
So you’re in Mississippi, and Mal’s in Missouri. Hopefully, we’ll get Mal in one of the shows this year because he’s Yeah. He’s he went to bed right before the show. Cool. Cool.
Yeah. And, of course, you know, he he gives us that awesome chat room we all use so much during 5090. I’m I’m guessing it’ll probably pop up during the phone too. Yeah. It’s been pretty active kind of in the last few days here.
For those of you I’ve talked about this on previous shows. If you go to chat.hypnopadia.org, there’s a kind of an unofficial chat room of FAWMers, and it can get pretty busy. And Oh, yeah. Mal hosts that, who’s George’s brother. It’s very cool.
Yeah. I’m looking forward to meeting the FAWMers. I’ve realized that the 5090-ers and FAWMers are 2 different crowds. There’s only a handful of you guys that actually did 5090. Right.
That’s pretty it’s like a whole new a whole new group of people to interact with. Yeah. I don’t know if they’re completely different crowds as much as most of the people who did 50 90 this year were kind of a subset of the active FAWMers. Mhmm. And there were there were a few people, like you and a few people who’ve been doing 5090 for the last few years, but hadn’t been doing FAWM, who’s kind of been who kind of joined the fold, so to speak.
And and it’ll be interesting to see if they’re active during during prom this February or not. But but, yeah, there’s a whole new group of people, George, that you haven’t met. Oh, yeah. I I could tell. Just the way everybody talks, I’m like, okay.
Well, these people know each other, and I have no idea who they are. So Yeah. There was one guy who was in 5090 who saved my life. I mean, he literally threw a life vest out to me, you know, at in my darkest hour during 5090. I’m telling you, 5090 was really freaking hard for me because it’s so long.
You know, it’s not it’s not a sprint, and I hit a couple roadblocks. It was like running a marathon, you know, where you hit that 20 mile marker and suddenly you don’t have any wind. You know, you’re just out of breath. Uh-huh. And it was a lot harder than than I anticipated, and I can’t remember the guy’s name.
I’ve got Jerry. I think his name is Jerry. And he was a long time 5090-er, and he gave me some advice during 5090 that just absolutely saved my life. He he just grounded me. And, I hope he’ll be involved in FAWM this year because he was great.
He could just crank out songs, and he had a great attitude about songwriting that he he was just he didn’t have any fear about songwriting anymore. He just had allowed himself to write, and so all his barriers had washed away once he had given himself that permission. And so he could just go out and crank out songs. It would and they were fun, cool songs, and he’d go in any direction. He did a bunch of a bunch of collaborations too.
Yeah. I’ve got on the on the chat here, Pig Farmer just told me that Jerry Collins is the guy’s name, Jerry Collins, and he was great. Really nice and very supportive. Yeah. A very cool guy.
K. Well, we’re down to 3 minutes left, folks, for this show. Burr, I wanna thank you for calling in and hanging out with us here on this sort of unofficial day before FAWM launch here. Well, thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure.
And, I hope you’ll call in again this month. Oh, I wanted to ask. Have you got any any themes up your sleeve this year, like not using acoustic guitar from the year before? Or no. I’m I’m not constraining myself in any way.
Last year, I started to write songs themed after the different planets in the solar system. So I might try to I I only got as far as Venus, so I I might try to go a little further out. Cool. We’ll see. That’s a good one.
Yeah. Well, I think I’m gonna try and write stuff for my looper because I bought a looper in an in an attempt to make a fuller sound when I play solo live, and I’ve been experimenting with that. And the more I’ve I’ve been trying to figure out how to use it for songs that I’ve already written. And the more I use it, the more I think I actually have to write songs for the looper rather than try to adapt older songs to the looper. So I think that’s my my, limitation or my theme setting this year.
It may be that I’m just gonna try and write songs specifically for that looper so I can play them live. So I think that’s one of the things that I’m gonna do. Excellent. How about you, George? What about me?
What, do you have any themes up your sleeve? Not specific. Like, I don’t have a real narrow theme. Most of my songs carry the a similar theme. It’s usually social commentary about the the government and things like that or or about more adult subjects from time to time.
But, no. Normally, when I try to write a rap song, I try to say something worth saying. I don’t do a lot of the, I don’t do a lot of gangster rap or, you know, money rap or anything like that. I try to make people think about what I’m saying. So it’ll probably just be whatever whatever I’m thinking is screwed up around me at the time.
Most of my rap is pretty personal stuff. So Cool. Cool. Alright, everybody. Thanks for tuning in.
I’m gonna hang up on, Burr again. Thanks, Burr, for coming in, and, George, thanks for calling. Everybody, you know, please call in in future shows. We’re gonna do these every day if we can. It’s gonna be 10 PM EST on weekdays and 2 PM on weekends so that we can facilitate people all over the world to call in.
And I hope you’ll call the next step. Thank you again for tuning in. Talk to you again tomorrow.