Indeed this is good news! I've suspected this day might come soon in spite of my getting progressively more disheartened as each of the last few days began to feel less and less productive, and it finally has! Dig this:

• Iowa: The obviously titled "This Song Is for Iowa" finally fell out of my head. The simple little chord progression I had been playing with and was sure would end up as the song for Iowa went out the window and got replaced completely. As a result, so did the little concept I was messing around with. Funny story: Remember I was toying with the idea of writing a Mountain Goatsesque song and calling it "Going to Iowa?" Well, I had long since abandoned that idea and grown more and more fond of doing a very noisy wall of fuzz pop song in the vein of Celesteville, which if you do not know already is the one man band alter ego of my friend Jake. Jake is from Iowa. Jake (as Celesteville) is doing NaSoAlMo as well. It would have been a beautiful touch to make the Iowa song a little Celesteville rip-off tribute. However, what finally came out actually sounds more like a damn Mountain Goats song than anything I've ever written! What the fuck? Sorry, Jake. And perhaps I should also apologize to John Darnielle!
• Michigan: "Big Schnuggle (Michigan Mix)" is actually a little different than all the others. I knew from day one what I was going to do with it, and "writing" it is not exactly "writing" the way any of the other songs have been written. See, through a roundabout technicality, this is actually the one cover song I'm allowed to do by NaSoAlMo's rules even though I did write the music. The explanation: My girlfriend wrote a song called "Big Schnuggle" for her band. She hasn't recorded it yet, but she has sung the melody to me on more than one occasion. So, I had planned to "remix" the song before she even records it herself. I'm told that "remix," in the context of dance music, can mean taking a little sample of a song and sticking it in a completely different song, so I'll be sampling Ab singing the chorus of her song and dropping it into mine. Yes, there is a specific reason I chose it to be the song for Michigan, but it's personal if not actually kind of obvious and probably not that exciting to anybody else anyway.

Yes. That's all of the planned songs written now.

what's on:
"Medicine" (The Sundays - Blind)