Song a Day: how a secret songwriters' group led to a wealth of new music from Feist, Mac DeMarco and more

When do musicians find the time to write songs? 

Sure, inspiration can strike at any moment, but it's also hard work that requires time, patience and focus, something that not all artists have in abundance. Leslie Feist, for example, was caring for a newborn baby when she wrote many of the songs for her latest, Polaris Music Prize-shortlisted album, Multitudes. As a single parent, it was difficult to carve out time for herself, let alone write music. But songwriting was also a crucial way for her to process her experiences of being a new mom, losing her father and undergoing all those tectonic changes in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. 

Enter Song a Day, a secret, recurring, invite-only songwriters' group organized by Feist's friend, producer and engineer Philip Weinrobe. The rules are simple: write one song every day, for seven straight days. The definition of a song was loosely defined — it could be a voice note, a rough sketch of a melody, or even just a little instrumental. And once you finished, you had to submit it by midnight to Weinrobe. 

While these groups have been meeting since before the pandemic, Weinrobe says there was an increased desire to host the sessions when everyone was isolated at the height of the lockdowns. "We had just done one in February of 2020," he remembers, "and then the pandemic hit and everyone was like, 'Should we just do another one right away?' So we started doing a bunch of them because we had nothing to do."

In an interview with WNXP, Feist said Song a Day worked as "a tool and a ticket to bypass all the machinations and the overthinking and the making of songwriting into this arduous, self-important, self-mythologizing struggle." Without the luxury of time to fuss over a creation, she, and other participants, were forced to get in touch with their intuitions. "By day seven," she continued, "I had a better instinct and musculature to open up the aperture." As a result, many of the songs off Multitudes were born from these week-long sessions; in total, she did Song a Day four times. 

"It's a kick in the pants that I've never experienced anywhere else," Ariel Engle, who performs in Broken Social Scene and solo as La Force, reveals. She was one of many artists Feist invited into the Song a Day fold, as numerous artists joined through word of mouth. "It just makes you better with your time, and it also reminds you every day that you're an artist, which you can forget if no one's asking anything of you." 

If you fail to adhere to these rules, you'll get kicked out of the group, which indie-rocker Mac DeMarco learned the hard way the first time he participated, also via an invite from Feist. "The first time [I did Song a Day], I was in it for a sec," DeMarco explains. "They were like, 'Oh, this kid's not even paying attention to the email.' But the second time around, Beck was like, 'You should do it this time,' and I actually did." 

'The good songs are going to come'

While these groups were never intended to be made public — and the music produced during these sessions solely meant to be an exercise with no pressure or intention to release it — some of the music produced has found its way into the world through a slew of albums released in the past few years: Feist's Multitudes; Hayden's Are We Good; Mac DeMarco's One Wayne G; Maggie Rogers' Surrender; and La Force's upcoming sophomore release, XO Skeleton. With each round involving 15-20 participants, these groups can often draw in some intimidating names, as Hayden joked to CBC's Q in April, "Everybody was more successful than me."  

Q24:39Hayden on writing a song a day

Canadian singer-songwriter Hayden on doubting your creative instincts, and collaborating with artists like Feist, Matt Berninger and Aaron Dessner on his first new album in eight years, Are We Good.

Weinrobe has no problem with artists talking about Song a Day in interviews — he assures that he didn't install ironclad Fight Club rules — but during those sessions, songs are meant to stay private. Only the participants can access the daily playlist of submissions, compiled by Weinrobe every morning, and feedback is not required, although artists will sometimes reach out and compliment each other's work. "I think it's interesting to talk about [Song a Day publicly] not to be like, 'Look at what we do,'" Weinrobe says, "but more like, 'Look, anyone can do this.' Just get some friends together. It's very simple, and it will mess you up in a really beautiful way."

It's hard to define exactly what Song a Day is — is it a workshop? A game? A daily exercise? — but Weinrobe sees it first and foremost as an accountability network. "It's tough to bail when it's all your friends and heroes sending in songs every day," he points out. In an interview with Apple Music, Maggie Rogers (who was invited to Song a Day by Adam Cohen) echoes this: "Every morning, you'd get a SoundCloud link of everyone's songs, and I'm hearing unreleased songs from all my favourite artists, and I'd go for a big walk, and then I'd be like, 'OK, time to show up. What am I going to turn in today?'" 

But Weinrobe also sees Song a Day as a practice of failure: "Any artistic practice involves a lot of failure, and coming up against that failure, and pushing past it not to success but to full failure, is a really important skill to practise."

"Most of the songs are very good," he continues, "and sometimes even all of them are very good, but even when they're not, you have to do it. And that's where all the good stuff happens. The good songs are going to come; it's how you handle the shitty songs that matters." 

Engle likens the daily process to fishing. "It's all about going fishing," she confesses. "It's setting time aside to go fishing, and some days you catch a minnow and some days you catch a bigger fish. But if you don't go fishing, you're not going to catch anything, right?" 

'You just want to stay in the club' 

Weinrobe is quick to clarify that he didn't invent this idea. Of course, songwriting camps have existed for decades, and are often used by some of the biggest artists to create hits. But this specific idea was first brought to Weinrobe by Brooklyn indie-folk band Big Thief, his former roommates. The band's guitarist, Buck Meek, recalls being introduced to it by friends of his and bringing Weinrobe into the fold. 

Meek sees Song a Day as "a simulation of an ideal," a world that best approximates songwriting as a spiritual practice. "What I like about Song a Day is that you really have to relinquish your ego," he explains. "My tendency, as a songwriter at least, is to try and control the song and obsess over every single detail and minutia, and feel potentially unsatisfied, which can slow down the creative process. Song a Day just forces you to move quickly and more intuitively, and just tap into your instincts and have fun with it." 

I can't imagine where my songwriting would be without this; it totally changed everything about how I write.- Philip Weinrobe

Musicians have also gone off and facilitated their own versions of Song a Day, like Beck, who branched off to host his own week-long sessions, and School of Song, a community that extends Song a Day's structure into month-long experiments led by teachers including Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold, Bartees Strange and Laura Veirs. 

Many artists interviewed for this feature emphasized the community aspect of it, even DeMarco, whose music-making process is mostly accomplished alone. "I don't play well with others," he admits. "But this is a way to engage with others while still being by yourself for the most part. You just want to stay in the club, and get emails from all your buddies and continue on. It was interesting to see where other people are at with their stuff." 

Most of DeMarco's Song a Day contributions can actually be found on One Wayne G, which featured 199 unreleased tracks; they're the ones with a song title attached, such as the Aug. 16, 2020, entry, "She Want That Sandwich," which was DeMarco's first-ever Song a Day submission.

For Weinrobe, who also makes music when he's not busy producing and engineering other people's work (including albums by Big Thief, Tomberlin and Alanis Morissette), Song a Day is the only time he gets to write music nowadays. "This is really my only practice that I've figured out," he reveals. "I can't imagine where my songwriting would be without this; it totally changed everything about how I write." In September 2020, he released an album titled Good Grief, which comprised eight tracks that he wrote during a Song a Day session, something he's contemplating doing again with a recent batch of songs.

Even though Song a Day is presented as just an exercise, it doesn't surprise Weinrobe to see so many of the songs find life on artists' albums. "It just shows you that good songs do just happen," he assures. "If you sit down and write a song every day for a week, you're going to get songs for your next record every time. And people will come to me and say, 'Hey, when is the next one? I've got a record I need to make!' So it becomes part of people's practice for getting their work done." 

Especially during those early lockdown days, Song a Day became a haven for songwriters. "It was just the perfect social and mental health activity," Weinrobe explains. "It was just so great to find a vital outlet. It was amazing."