Tag Archives: 365 project

Day 120 – My Birthday Song

Posted on 1 May, 2012 by Ardie Collins

A year ago today I posted this song for the 365 project I seemed to be doing. I’m hoping that my past-self was feeling particularly facetious that day, otherwise he’s a bit of an idiot. Then again, these may not be mutually exclusive.

I don’t really know why I wanted to post this again. Two years ago I may have just acknowledged a little landmark like this with a quiet nod to no one, but now I seem to shout things about myself at people on the internet.

On my 23rd birthday this was the song I managed to churn out to then become associated with the day, and now I can look back and be all pleased because at that stage I had no idea that I’d actually finish the thing.

Not to be too unnecessarily contemplative, but some of the things I associate with being 23 were pretty good. These were mainly getting my debut novel published and finishing the 365 project. Which has made me think about what I want to do with this whole being 24 business, and I hope there’ll be things I manage to make that I’ll be just as pleased with. I reckon I’ve peaked, though. Yeah. Probably peaked.

Lyrics and poetry and rhythm and subheadings.

Posted on 24 April, 2012 by Ardie Collins

Word-cloud of the complete Cooper365 lyrics.

This has been lingering about in my mind-tank for a while and I wanted to solidify some of it by writing it out. So I thought maybe I could write one of those blog posts I say I sometimes write. This could be considered a kind of advice post, but it really would be in the loosest sense of the word. If you’re interested in my take on putting lyrics together, however, then you’ve come to the right place. There’s even subheadings, guys. Subheadings.

So if you’re the sort of person that can’t stand context or long introductory justifications for why a blog post should be allowed to exist then the following jumpy links might be of interest to you.

Subheading 1: Why does this post you’re showing me even exist?
Subheading 2: Please patronise me by pretending you understand poetry.
Subheading 3: Are you finally going to talk about writing lyrics now?
Subheading 4: Can I go now?

Subheading 1: Why does this post you’re showing me even exist?

So there were a few things that prompted all of this mulch which is about to spew out in the form of a blog post. The first is a series of videos by Jonathan Mann that I was watching back when he was uploading them on a more regular basis where he was offering advice to people about how he writes a song a day. And he’s now been writing a song a day for over 1,200 days, so he’s pretty dedicated and in a good position to be dishing out this advice, I think. The second was a video by Alan Lastufka about how he writes lyrics. He was dealing more with the meaning behind lyrics and the basic use of similies and metaphors and that kind of thing. This post isn’t so much about that, it’s more about the actual process of getting lyrics down on paper. Read the rest of this entry →

Interview on BBC Radio Wales

Posted on 9 January, 2012 by Ardie Collins

Someone at BBC Radio Wales heard about my Cooper365 project and invited me in today to talk about it.

As you can hear it was only mildly awkward, and I would say it went a lot better than I thought it would.

I’ve cut out the chunk of audio that was the interview (and at the end they played Crooked Barstool to close things off). It turns out this counts as national radio airplay (I often have to check Wikipedia to find out if I even live in a country. Apparently Wales is still a country.) And apparently the BBC pay people 48p for every track they play. HELLYEAH.

Also, I mentioned the song I wrote for Geekpop during the interview and realised I haven’t put this here yet which I’m sure is making you weep all over your keyboards. Here it is.

Ok. Lovely.

Some Cooper365 Highlights

Posted on 2 January, 2012 by Ardie Collins

I made a video that was intended for the promotion of the ‘Perpetual Noise’ mix and in the description I started putting in some highlights. It got a little out of control and so I thought I’d also put them here as a kind of ‘link-dump’ post.

So I did plenty of other stuff this year, but these are some things that I’d consider to be some direct offshoots of this project of mine. I decided to write ‘Oh, hey remember…’ at the start of them all because I’m hilarious and nonchalant. Read the rest of this entry →

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The Cooper365 Project

Posted on 31 December, 2011 by Ardie Collins

This year I took on a project to release one original song for every day of the year. It was a reasonably ridiculous idea. I’ve been thinking a lot about why I did it, and I’m still not entirely sure why. I think it was partly down to boredom. It might also have been because I’d been writing songs for years and was interested to see how I’d do with song-writing deadlines. I had gone through a little spurt of song-writing towards the end of last year and wanted to see if I could take something on that would force me to learn how to write better songs, and just to see if I could do it. So I think that’s what it was at first: an experiment. I enjoy a challenge (which is helpful), and this project was certainly a challenge. The way I’ve always written songs is to play around until the beginning of a song emerges and to then commit to it and try and finish it in one sitting. It seemed like a natural progression to see how many times I could do that.

Today I finished the thing. So it was definitely a success in the most basic sense, but for someone who relishes in cynicism and self-deprecation I’m surprised at how much I feel like it was a success in other ways. Read the rest of this entry →

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Ardie Collins