It's coming up to midday on a Saturday morning and here we are at the end of August once again. And I feel shattered; I had another rough night last night. The pain woke me up at around half-past four and I don't feel like I got properly back to sleep at all, even though my watch reckons I got three half-hour stretches of NREM sleep between 7 am and 9:30 am. Both physically and mentally I'm a bit of a mess at the moment and I still haven't bounced back from overdoing things a few weeks ago. Despite drinking my usual pint of coffee earlier this morning I'm sitting here yawning my head off. To resort to a favourite and very useful metaphor, I have already run out of today's allocation of spoons. Read my earlier blog entries here this month, and you'll see that they are riddled with mentions of feeling exhausted. I hate feeling like this.

As my buddy Mel is fond of telling me, I've been pushing my creative side very hard indeed since I rebuilt my home studio four years ago and completely immersed myself in the act of making music. With the album that I'm planning to release for Bandcamp Friday next week, I'll have recorded thirty albums since December 2020 and each of them has around an hour of original music on it. I really haven't stopped for a break since June 2020 so I shouldn't be surprised to discover that things are finally catching up with me. I need to start practising some self care before I really keel over. And I know I've said this before but you will be surprised to hear that I have actually started to do so; earlier this month I decided to stop my Thursday night streaming sessions on Twitch because they have increasingly like I was screaming into the void with them; I know that they were appreciated, because when I announced that I was stopping them I got some nice emails telling me so, but the amount of money I was making from Twitch doesn't come close to justifying the vast amount of work that I felt I needed to put into them. And to be honest, I've been genuinely shocked by how much of a relief it's been to not have to be upbeat and productive for an hour or so on camera every Thursday evening.

I've bought myself a few treats this month, including a new pair of Nike high tops to replace my favourite pair which I bought at least thirteen years ago (the old ones are practically falling apart, but I can't bring myself to throw them away, because they're still extremely comfortable to wear). I've also been filling in some of the gaps in my music collection and I'm currently listening to XTC albums on the big system in the living room.

When it comes to physically exerting myself, I think my limit at the moment is walking down the road to the shop. I really need to get the lawn cut, but I'm afraid that's just going to have to wait for a few days longer.

Maybe the weather has something to do with how I feel. It feels very oppressive today and my phone has just pinged me with an advance yellow warning of thunderstorms which comes into effect here at 4 am tomorrow morning. There have been many such warnings this year but not one of them has amounted to anything other than brief showers. I wouldn't mind being awake in the small hours of the morning if I had some thunder and lightning to entertain me...

This week I got the latest bill from my energy company, and I was rather pleased to see that they'd charged me a total of £-63.57. Did you spot that minus sign? It's kinda important. For the second month in a row, they've paid me, instead of me paying them.

I'm on a plan called Intelligent Octopus Flux which means that as well as exporting any surplus energy from my solar panels back to the grid, I also let Octopus take power from my battery during peak hours, when the tariff is highest and then they charge my battery back up again in the middle of night, when demand is lowest and electricity is therefore at its cheapest. Over the last month that has meant that I've sold the grid nearly £195 of electricity. Take away the cost of the electricity I've actually used in the last month as well as the cost of charging the battery back up, and then subtract the amount of gas I used (which was less than £20) and I'm still left with Octopus owing me £63.57 (and I also got a "free electricity credit" of £0.02 as well; go me!)

I like this game.

I've had a productive couple of days and as a result, I'm now a couple of songs ahead of schedule for 50-90 this year with thirty-three tracks completed and published on the web page in that link.

I'm happy with the work I'm doing, too. Inspired by everything that I learned last month at the Real World Production Masterclass, I've been taking a much more considered approach to writing, recording, and mixing this year. I've been stretching out and experimenting, too, using different tools and techniques (even drum loops!) in an effort to shake myself out of any creative ruts I might have been stuck in. I even ended up playing the bongos.

I've been taking ideas for songs from wherever they present themselves. Each summer I make a point of choosing titles for songs so that by the end of the challenge, I'll have at least one that begins with each letter of the alphabet. I've been doing this for years now and you would have thought that for some letters, it becomes harder to think of new titles without running the risk of repeating yourself. And yet this year, it's been easier than ever. Quite frankly, coming up with a song whose title began with an X this year was a no-brainer. I only have two letters to go to have the full alphabet covered, and neither of the two letters I have yet to use is likely to present much of a challenge for me to come up with a decent title.

So once again I'm going to spend today in my home studio making music. It continues to be one of the most life-affirming and sustaining things I have ever done and if you've ever thought of sitting down and writing a song or two, I would strongly encourage you to do so. Last year, I wrote a book in which I explain how to get started and describe my own creative process (or at least, my process as it was back then) and if you want to get yourself a copy, together with a selection of the demo recordings which are mentioned in the book, you can get it here. It's Bandcamp Friday again a week tomorrow, by the way. Just sayin'.

I had a lovely day yesterday catching up with Ruth (and meeting her partner Alex for the first time; it's been a very long time since we sat down for a natter!) The venue for all this was just over the road at her uncle Boris's place. Matthew cooked an immense roast dinner for everybody and excelled his always extremely high culinary standards. It was all rather splendid.

Additional entertainment was provided by Archie, Ed's spaniel (because they were all dog-sitting for the day) and there was much throwing of tennis balls and retrieving going on in Matthew's back garden. Archie only ended up in the pond a couple of times; we all pretended not to notice.

And as a result, last night my watch gave me a perfect sleep score of 100. Clearly that was just what I needed.

I seem to have recovered some of my motivation to make music this week. By lunchtime yesterday I'd caught up with where I need to be if I want to stay on track for writing fifty songs by October 1st for the 50-90 Challenge which I take part in every year. And yesterday's song came more easily, too—so I seem to have gotten past whatever it was that has been getting in the way recently.

The rate at which songs are being posted and comments are being made has slowed down considerably as it always does now we're at the tail end of August (because most participants are American and children in the United States have already gone back to school, so fewer people are on holiday and have free time for making music) but Burr (our illustrious FAWMer in chief) reports that site activity is down about 20% on last year. It's difficult to know for sure what's driving that. The website has been entirely rebuilt this year. It's been redesigned to encourage a more even distribution of listens and therefore (hopefully) comments and this seems to be working. The maximum number of comments made on a song does not show such a sharp spike at the top end of the list. This has not gone down well with a few old hands who are seeing a noticeable drop in engagement with their material; some of them are really not happy about this at all. There has been a surprising and rather depressing amount of grumbling and whingeing going on and that is not going to give a good impression to anyone scoping out the site in order to see if it's the sort of thing they want to sign up for.

But I have a theory of my own about why participation is down this year and it's not connected to the redesign at all.

I said here in the blog a few days ago that I was feeling really sad and more than a little bit angry about how some people have behaved during 50-90 this year. I wrote this post in an attempt to figure out what was behind that feeling and I hope it will help you to understand why I might feel that way.

I strongly believe that we all have a moral obligation to interact with and support the rest of any community we join. Doesn't it make sense that we all help each other in what we're doing? (Well, unless you're a Republican, that is; I guess that sort of ideology is anathema to them, but Republicans these days obviously belong to some sort of weirdo cult).

As far as I'm concerned if you're part of a community like 50-90 is, you should act like you're part of it. That means interacting with others rather than just sitting there posting your own work and then expecting people to magically find your stuff and tell you how wonderful it is while you steadfastly ignore what everybody else is doing. Why should others care about your work if you don't show any evidence that you care about theirs?

Since the challenge started on July 4th I've been steadfastly listening and commenting to other people's music (and reading their lyrics too, because not everybody posts demos of what they've written). I don't mean to boast and I loathe the idea of virtue signalling, but there are only seven people taking part this year who have left more comments on other people's work. That's driven by the immense value I place on this particular community of ours. And I believe that making so many comments is why the music I make these days has improved (IMNSHO) to such a ridiculous degree compared with what I used to make when I first signed up. Giving feedback on a piece requires you to you think about how it was created. Why did that song make you feel so happy? Was it the way that the dynamics of the music led you along, boosting your energy and then pulling back before the big finish? Why did a particular line of lyrics resonate with you so strongly? Putting together a few sentences which explain to someone why you thought their work was so cool will help you to think about making your own work better. And that's not exactly an onerous task to ask of someone, is it?

People have been doing some really great work this summer and I've been expressing my appreciation as best I can. (If you have time, I highly recommend browsing the songs page and giving some of them a listen for yourself.) Possibly as a result of all the commenting that I've been doing, I'm still receiving plenty of nice compliments on my own work. I could tell you that that this isn't why I take part in the challenge every year (and quite honestly it's not my main motivation for participating) but it is still very nice when somebody takes the time to tell you that they liked what you did. It gives me a nice buzz, and that makes me want to write more songs and keep that endorphin rush going.

And the feedback that I get from what other people tell me about my work is worth its weight in gold. I have learned more about songwriting from those comments than I would have done if I'd spent my whole lifetime writing on my own without an audience. Honest feedback from others on what you're doing is essential if you want to improve your craft as an artist, and I very much do.

But this year there has been a big push back against commenting in the forums. Why? I reckon that people really don't like to be made to feel uncomfortable about not meeting their social obligations. A small number of FAWMers have been quite vociferous in justifying their objection to the site's long-standing culture which encourages leaving comments. They are not only saying they feel "pressured" to do so, they're even complaining about getting stressed out by the fact that there's a "century club" thread in the forums that celebrates people who have left at least one hundred comments on other people's work. That attitude seems rather peevish to me, and incredibly childish. But it also completely misses the point of commenting. I've said before that comments are the life blood of a challenge like FAWM or 50-90 and I believe that more strongly than ever now, because it feels like people this year have taken that push back against commenting as a free pass for not bothering to do the work in sustaining their community. Because that's what it comes down to: the decline in participation is, I believe, directly related to people wanting to dedicate as little time or effort as possible to supporting anyone else's endeavours. I have no idea why this has suddenly become more prevalent this year but people aren't getting as many comments as they used to, the endorphin high is no longer as strong, and people are giving up and staying away.

What's worse, a few people have taken to commenting on their own songs to prevent them sitting on the "zero comment" or "Zong" category in the song listing (Zongs have a red flag next to them to make them stand out; the idea is that this should encourage other people to listen to them and support the artist who made them by leaving a nice comment). What's the point? How does leaving a comment on your own work improve your abilities as a songwriter? Quite frankly, de-zonging your own work feels to me like the FAWMer is actively sabotaging the ethos of the site and working against what has made the challenges so much fun to attempt.

I feel quite strongly about this. You can tell, can't you?

We're now more than half-way through the 50-90 songwriting challenge (in which you're set the goal of writing 50 songs in the 90 days between July 4th and October 1st) and at the moment I'm way behind compared to where I would normally be at this point in August. I have only completed 24 tracks so far, although I have another one in progress and I'll be working on that (and another idea or two) later today. 2022 was an exceptional year, yes—but back then I'd cruised to fifty songs by August 12th and by the third week of the month I'd recorded and posted another nine songs. And all of them were big production numbers, too (because I'm me, so of course they were) and so my efforts this month seem rather paltry although with an hour and thirty-five minutes of new music under my belt that's not really the case at all. It just feels like it to me.

But I'm struggling. I can't blame the hot weather that August brought in previous years, because it's been pleasantly cool and fresh this week. The problem I've got is that the pain I'm in at the moment is disrupting my sleep and while last night's sleep score of 80 was an improvement on the 64 I got a few days ago, I just feel permanently exhausted. It's making it difficult to feel inspired to do anything creative and yes, I've already flipped the problem on its head and written a song about it yesterday which got me to 24, but the ideas aren't flowing as profusely as they normally do.

I've learned not to push through this sort of phase. I've done so on the past and nothing I created as a result sounded at all satisfactory when I listened back to it a few weeks later. I'll just sit tight and ride it out by reading lots of books (I'm expecting the postie to deliver yet another parcel from World of Books later today with a stack of second-hand books about music production, which I'm looking forward to burying myself in for a couple of days). And I have a collection of inspiring new toys banked up to get the creative juices flowing once the muse returns. This includes a set of bongos (yes, honestly) which I have now tuned (which has made them sound much better than they did when I unpacked them). I have a big wooden box full of assorted percussion toys to play with, including tambourines and hand drums (seeing what such things added to a track when I was at Real World last month was a revelation). And last but not least, I am very much enjoying playing the Warr guitar I recently acquired. It has shaken up my melodic habits in interesting ways and now that I've recorded with it a few times, I've learned how to make it sound great.

I realise too that I am in a very privileged position to be able to do what I do every day like this. I'm profoundly grateful for that; I think I would probably have gone mad by now if I didn't have that opportunity.

One of the reasons that I get so much out of 50-90 is that it requires me to work hard at getting the sounds and performances that I want each song to feature. I want to sound like I'm a whole band, and since I started taking part in FAWM and 50-90 I think I've come a long way in doing exactly that. Pushing myself to get better at what I do has paid off handsomely for me, and hearing how much my abilities have improved as a result has been a powerful source of joy. Dammit, I'm good!

I use a drum plugin called Superior Drummer 3 as my drummer because I have no room in my studio for a real kit (and even if I did, I can't play the drums) but I will often program the individual beats using my Ableton Push or just clicking directly on the piano roll of MIDI information in Ableton. If I do use MIDI performance data that was generated by someone else, I'll tweak it; I'll also change the drums on the stock preset kits if I don't like the sound of a particular cymbal or snare drum. But even doing this makes me feel like I'm doing something that borders on cheating—at least until I remember that artists including Prince and Mike Oldfield have been very enthusiastic users of the Linn Drum and similar pieces of technology since the beginning of the 1980s.

But this year 50-90 has seen several new participants making extensive use of ChatGPT to help them with their lyric writing (and not all of them have had the honesty to admit they're doing so although it's pretty bloody obvious that's what's going on, even before I threw their lyrics into AI checkers like ZeroGPT and got results indicating that more than half their text had been generated by AI). It's not just the lyrics, either. There are now tools you can use online which will vomit up a complete audio file of a song based on a text prompt that you give it. That includes the vocals; just throw your ChatGPT-written lyrics into the prompt, tell the AI what sort of singer ought to be singing them, and you'll get something that almost sounds convincing. Almost; a song that's been made using the AI "music generator" site Udio has an extremely distinctive sound to it and again, on the 50-90 site this year I've encountered more than one person posting songs which exhibit exactly that sound, even if the "artist" claiming to be responsible for them makes no mention of the fact that they're using AI to generate it. Give Udio a few years, and I'm sure I will no longer be able to tell that its results were made by a machine.

This goes against the FAWM AI Statement which explicitly asks all FAWMers not to "use AI to create complete music or lyrics that you pass off wholly as your own." And it also goes against everything that I regard as being essential to working as a songwriter or as a musician. If all you're doing is telling a computer to write a song for you rather than doing any of the creative heavy lifting yourself, what's the point? How can you expect to improve as an artist if this is how you work? How can you expect people to even accept what you do as being creative in any way? One thing's for sure: I do not engage with anyone on the site who "creates" music in this way because as far as I'm concerned, they're not just frauds, they're liars. And most importantly, they're not musicians; they're just typists.

It's the most depressing thing I've seen happen in the challenges since I signed up way back in 2009. It makes me very sad, and really angry.

This morning (with an unwanted dash of irony) my watch has awarded me a sleep score of sixty-four. I had a rough night last night. I'd gone to bed early because I was so tired, but I was in a lot of pain and my mind was racing and just after midnight I decided that I was just lying there stewing, so I got up to see if the sky was clear enough to watch for more Perseids. It was, so I sat in my chair on the back lawn for an hour or so to watch for shooting stars and see if I could stop the ruminating thoughts and calm down.

Last night I had a much wider field of view than I did on Sunday and Monday night, because next door have had their Leylandii hedge chopped down. It's made quite a difference, to put it mildly. Despite being able to see much more of the sky, I only saw a few meteors and none of them left a persistent trail like the ones I saw on Monday night; the Perseids are well past their peak now. But I did see a considerable number of satellites, including one in a polar orbit (it was heading North) which was obviously tumbling; its brightness waxed and waned very noticeably.

But when I finally went back to bed, sleep still wouldn't come. I was still awake three hours later. Eventually I switched on the pedestal fan that stands next to my bed (it has a timer that switches it off after an hour or two) and the white noise was enough to finally soothe me to sleep. The folks taking out next door's hedge arrived bright and early at 8 am this morning though, so it didn't last for long. I haven't had a night that bad for quite a while but I'm going to take the fact that I managed to get through it without resorting to painkillers or medication of any other kind as a win.

The crash in the local insect population which I mentioned below is not a case of me exaggerating things; it's real, and it's bad.

I've had a very nice birthday weekend. I spent Saturday with Helen and we had a very nice lunch at the White Horse in Buckover (we sat outside to take advantage of the splendid view of the Severn Estuary and the atomic power station at Oldbury!) before spending the afternoon sitting in the back garden in the sunshine drinking Aperol spritzes and catching up with what we'd both been up to this year. I can't think of a better way to spend the day; it was lovely.

Yesterday was my actual birthday, and was a much quieter affair. After a hectic week it was nice to just relax and do next-to-nothing all day. In the evening I sat in my lawn chair in the back garden admiring the stars Deneb, Vega, and Altair (which make up the Summer Triangle), watching for satellites (I must have seen at least thirty) and trying to spot Perseid meteors (I didn't see one).

I did see several bats, which is the first time I've seen any this year (possibly related to the alarming crash in the numbers of insects that there are about these days) and I was kept company on the back lawn by the local hedgehogs, who were not at all fussed by the fact that a human being was sitting next to them while they finished off the mealworms and suet pellets which I'd left out for the birds that afternoon. Hogs can be very noisy eaters!

The weather forecast is good for this evening so I'll be back outside watching for meteors once again tonight. If you're wondering where to find the constellation of Perseus (which is the location of the radiant of the shower, hence their name) so you can spot a few too, then look in the North-East sky at around midnight and find the very obvious "W" of Cassiopeia; Persus lies to the left, just underneath. I hope you see more than I did last night; other people were rather luckier!

This week has been a busy one; too busy, I think. I've been doing lots of stuff around the house and the garden; hammers and cold chisels were involved as well as the hedge trimmers and the lawnmower; I filled the garden waste bin to the brim and could easily have done so several times over; indoors, lots of stuff has been moved around, recycled, thrown out or otherwise reorganised (and I have been making good use of the loft ladder, which has made life much easier in that regard); yesterday I made not one but two big shopping trips (and in opposite directions at that). After taking a break for a couple of months I've also gone back to lifting weights in an effort to control the constant pain that I'm in. I have been remarkably active in comparison to my normal routine.

And for the last day or so I've been paying the price. At the moment the only thing helping the pain is a hot bath, but last night it was much too hot and humid for that. Just before I went live on Twitch I checked the relative humidity in the studio and it was sitting at 68% so at bedtime I opted for a cold shower instead. The result of this was that last night the pain woke me up every time I moved and I completely failed to properly fall asleep. Even after taking some extra-strength painkillers (at half-past three in the morning) I couldn't find a comfortable position. I just lay in bed listening to the wind throwing rain against the Virginia creeper outside the window and sighing a lot. I think I finally fell asleep around half-past four and I'd woken up again by six thirty.

Today I feel sore and shattered and aside from doing the ironing and a bit of tidying up I haven't really had the energy to do much of anything. The big box of percussion gear which I ordered after getting back from Real World arrived and usually that would be enough to get me running to the studio to make some music with it all, but after I'd unpacked everything and put vast quantities of the cardboard packaging it came in into the recycling pile, I realised that I had pretty much run out of spoons. I've barely touched the rather spiffy and very shiny set of bongos for example, and that's just not like me at all. So this evening I'm going to be self-indulgent and open a bottle of wine to go with the pizza I'm having for tea. Both of these practices are unusual for me these days, which is probably why I weigh less now than I have done for several years, but it's the end of what feels like a very long week and I need a bit of pampering.

It's supposed to be a bit cooler today than it was yesterday or on Tuesday. It doesn't feel like it. It's hot outside and very humid and I feel woozy, like I've been fed a dose of knockout drops. I'm making sure that I stay hydrated, and I'll be keeping indoors out of the sunshine but once again I don't think I'll be getting much done today. I've just checked the studio in the back bedroom upstairs to see how viable it's going to be to make music later on and it's 29°C (84°F) in there right now with a relative humidity of 55% so the answer is a definite "nope."

It doesn't look like the weather is going to provide much in the way of a respite for the rest of the day. I've just run through the Met Office animation of rainfall that's forecast for later today and while there are some signs of thunderstorms developing to the south of me in Devon as well as off to the north in Gloucestershire, it looks like this neck of the woods is going to stay dry.

I really don't do hot weather. Never have.