J. Elliot: One Song Per Week

Posted by Flick in Artist Review on 11 6th, 2007 | no responses |

J. Elliot: One Song Per Week If you were a songwriter and had a home studio, how often would you record songs? J. Elliot answered this question with “one song per week,” and started the One Song Per Week blog.

J. Elliot writes and tracks every instrument, mixes, and streams the new song on his website… all accomplished on a weekly basis. The songs are sold digitally on Myspace for $.99, or $2.99 for each month’s “album” of material. Listeners of his blog are given a poll each week to respond to the new song, as well as the option to voice their opinion through comments.

Elliot shared with Puddlegum, “The main goal here is to just share the songs with people, and maybe those people will tell other people and voila, suddenly you’ve got something.”

This week J. Elliot posted his tenth song since starting on August 30. We asked Elliot about the difficulty of writing and recording on a consistent basis:

“The consistency has not been a problem… yet. I have been known to go thru bouts of debilitating writers block. But the last year has been pretty good to me (in terms of subject matter). I have definitely become more disciplined. When it’s time to work, I work. As opposed to getting sidetracked and thinking ‘boy, I should probably go check my email’ or something.

I get a little panicky if it’s just a few days until post time and nothings surfaced. It’s not just the writing of the song. It’s playing all the parts, too, and putting them together. I’m a bit obsessed with harmonies and will spend hours getting them right. I love the piano, too, but as I have no piano player I just decided ‘f*** it, i’ll learn to play it.’”

Before moving to Portland, Chris Funk (now a member of The Decemberists) backed Elliot up on pedal steel guitar while he lived in Eugene, Oregon.

“Chris Funk and I spent a lot of time together in Eugene, Oregon. Back then he was really popular as the only pedal steel guitar player around, and just an over-all nice guy. We were all broke and would drink at our neighborhood bars and play music. He came out of the midwest, and started to play a lot with my friend Ashleigh Flynn, and as she and I did a lot of shows together, he would sit in with me, too. He played on the first cassette tape I ever made.

We also opened up one time for Alejandro Escovedo. It was a disaster! I broke a G string and went running around backstage looking for one, finally borrowing one from Alejandro, all the while leaving Funk alone on stage with his Dobro and told him to just ‘do something…anything!’”

J. Elliot’s girlfriend is Heather Pollock who performs under the name of Lo-Fi Sugar. “Thru a series of lucky coincidences… and myspace, she wound up singing two songs on Paul Van Dyk’s latest album ‘In Between‘“

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