A couple hundred days ago, Vermont singer and songwriter Dan Weintraub challenged himself to write one song each day for 1,000 days.
He thought the practice would get him some sought-after recognition, maybe even a bit of local fame.
And while his self-imposed song-writing task did land him more gigs, the practice took him in a different direction than he first expected.
Weintraub is a teacher and soccer coach at Kimball Union Academy, a boarding school in Meriden, New Hampshire. He first tried the song-a-day idea a handful of years ago but didn't stick to it. Then, when he was on the west coast in a recording studio with his high-school-aged musician daughter, the idea struck him again.
"There wasn't, at least at first, any great artistic motivation behind this," says Weintraub. "I watched my daughter singing and getting a lot of attention and I was like, '... Why shouldn't I, at the age of 54, get attention for my music as well?' ... So, what started as a way to sort of see if the world out there would start listening to my music more has become pretty introspective and pretty interesting."
Weintraub writes the lyrics and melody and then uploads it to his website using the voice-recorder app on his smartphone. His tunes range from observing everyday happenings and parenting, to big events like putting his signature on divorce paperwork in the song titled, "I Signed The Form," or to documenting his own father's illness.
At the end of the 1,000 days, Weintraub says he thinks he'll feel relieved. "I think that when I get to the end I will put the guitar down and maybe play out a little bit," he says. "It's very much just about my daily practice of writing my song and I thought it was going to be much more outwardly expressed ... which was kind of surprising for me because I'm very much an attention-seeking person. Doing a practice like this has been, I think, kind of good for me."
You can follow Dan Weintraub's 1,000 Songs In 1,000 Days project here.
