Song A Day: Welcome To Song A Day
Jonathan Mann, 2026
Description
A meditation on the strengths and limitations of Song A Day.
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Date2026-07-21GenreElectroInstrumentDrum MachineInstrumentPianoInstrumentSamplesInstrumentSynthsLocationHartford, CT Studio 4LyricsI started writing a song a day when I was
26.
Now I'm in my
40s and I'm still going. I've kept up song a day through getting married,
losing loved ones, the birth of two children, and the adoption of a third
song a day has continued through busy days, boring days, sick days,
Covid days, and even hospital stays.
The songs are not all great.
In fact, in my opinion, many of them are not.
But of the many things I've learned, one important one is this.
It is not up to me to decide the value of the things I
make.
A song that I tossed off in a moment between cooking dinner and putting
the kids to bed will turn out to be someone's favorite that I've ever
done.
And this hasn't happened just once.
It's like a regular occurrence.
People like to talk about the act of being consistent in the way they
create and share quote unquote content.
But I found that there's the consistency in content and there's consistency in your
practice.
Consistent content is what the algorithm craves and demands.
It's choosing a niche and sticking within those confines.
If you're writing a song a day, it means using the same instrument every
day, framing your video the same way, writing songs that are more or less
in the same genre, on topics that don't vary too widely.
But that kind of consistency just isn't me.
The world of recording is so vast, the world of creating a video is
so enormous that I long ago made the decision to sacrifice what the algorithm
wants for what I want to be free to make a song about whatever
topic, using whatever instrumentation and any type of video techniques that interest me.
This has meant that when a song goes viral, most people don't stick around.
Or more accurately, the algorithm learns to shuffle them off in another direction.
Because one day I'll produce a track that goes
Baby
Yoda,
Baby
Baby
Yoda.
Then the next day, improvise a song on the electric guitar about impeachment hearings,
then make a track produced around a song I wrote called I
Won't make that
Mistake
Again, and then a song where I'm sitting under my desk playing the bass.
The
Baby
Yoda song got
9 million views.
The subsequent ones got less than
2000 combined. I know that if I followed the rules of consistent content, I
would have a much larger audience.
But lately I've been thinking that I also might not have done the best
job of framing what song a day is.
You shouldn't arrive to song a day thinking you like every song.
Some days are bangers and some days are just
Tuesday.
Or that because you heard one acoustic ballad about video games that you can
expect to hear something like that every single day.
What you should expect is just me interpreting through songs, my life and the
world as I experience it in all its beauty and grotesquery and injustice and
hope and ugliness.
If that sounds interesting to you, welcome to
Sanga
Day.MoodHopefulStyleNarratorStyleUpbeatStyleWistfulTopicSong A Day