Maggie Lowe

Yesterday, I performed at the Davidson Farmer’s Market in Davidson, North Carolina. It was a delightful pre-fall morning and I had three hours of music to perform. Which isn’t very out of the ordinary. What is out of the ordinary is the music I had to play.

I performed at the Farmer’s Market last on August 9th and in the 35 days between, I wrote 30 new pieces of music, learned three new cover songs, and performed a setlist made completely of new songs that no one had ever heard before.

How did this all start?

Early this year (I think it was March) I discovered this post on Instagram:

Now. If you read the whole thing (like I thought I did) you will undoubtedly discover that this is a group that curates playlists and what they wanted you to do with this challenge is to go to your favorite streaming platform and pick 31 songs for 31 prompts in 31 days. Which would be a lot of fun and I may get around to that eventually…but my short attention span did one of two things depending on how you look at it. It either messed me up or REALLY helped me out.

Life As a Movie Project

I work hard to cycle through music for the Farmer’s Market but on the 9th it felt like a good idea to come back to the Market in a month and be able to play all new music. So I started writing on the prompts.

This project has been so cathartic and beautiful. I wrote a lot of the songs fairly quickly and easily. Some of them were chords first and the words came to me in the car. Some of them were one liners first and I hunted down the right music for them. I have used different tunings and rhythms and tried new things with melodies. I think one of my favorite parts of this challenge has been the last 4-5 prompts. As I got towards the end I did start struggling with what to write about. And that’s when life said, “Hey. Hold my root beer.” People told me stories, things happened in the news and I was inspired to finish out the project. (I do have one song left but it has a title and will be written as soon as I finish my breakfast.)

Thank you to everyone who came out to the Farmer’s Market yesterday to enjoy a sunny Saturday. Thanks to the woman who came over to me to go on and on about my original songs. Thanks to the man who read my sign about my challenge and yelped, “THIRTY NEW SONGS!?! Congratulations! That’s amazing!” And thanks for reading this. I’m very proud of this project and these songs and I am excited to continue sharing them with you all.

XOX – Maggie