We’ve launched a companion website for our 2020101 album project, at 2020101.net. We’re using it to collect and archive stories, anecdotes, and remembrances of people’s experiences of 2020. If you have a story to share on one of the topics, please email it to me.

Song 1 from 2020101. This feels like a hell of a way to start an album!

Okay, so, now that Shannon has let the cat out of the bag, I can talk about this too:

We’ve just embarked on our most ambitious album project yet.

It’s called 2020101. And here’s how it’s going to work:

Over the last months, Shannon has collected stories and remembrances from our community (that’s you!) of your experiences of 2020. The good … the not-so-good … the challenges … the successes … the difficulties … the bright spots (there were some!) … all of it.

And then she spent the last couple of weeks going back over the hundreds of stories we received, cataloging all of it, and identifying the common themes that people seemed to be circling back to. There ended up being eleven common themes! I’ll come back to this in a moment.

As you know, we usually make our albums on our own, in private. We generally release a first single in April, and then the rest of the album in June.

But this year we’re doing something radically different! We’ve conceived of this year’s album as an iterative, evolving process. And here’s how we’re going to do it.

Starting today, Shannon is going to start writing. She’s going to write one song on each of the eleven themes that surfaced as being universal in our community. And, as she writes, I’m going to produce and mix. So far, fairly normal.

But here’s the twist: this year, WE ARE GOING TO RELEASE THE SONGS AS WE MAKE THEM. We’re going to release one finished song every ten days, starting next week. We’ll release song 1 on February 16th; we’ll release song 11 on May 17th. All told, this will be a journey of 101 days from the first song to the last.

And, all along the way, we’re going to be sharing and signal-boosting your experience, strength, and hope. It’s going to be 101 days of storytelling and music, hopefully with the goal of placing this last wild, tumultuous year in some retrospective context. In this iterative retelling of your stories – of your reflections, your lessons, your grief, your joy – we’ll encapsulate for posterity what 2020 meant to you and to us. Like a primer. 2020 101.

We’re so excited to share this journey with you. Get writing, Shannon

Our dear friend and DIY music hero Martin Atkins talked with Shannon and me today about various DIY music stuff that we’re involved in, as part of his Midwest Music Expo. Martin is such a good human and it was a lovely conversation.

Our new album of Shannon’s is out! Written / programmed / co-produced by Shannon; produced / mixed / mastered by me. We hope you love it.