on the eve of the second annual RPM challenge, musicians reflect on how the process of writing and recording an album in a single month influenced the way they work 

In February 2006, more than 500 musicians participated in a musical revolution on the Seacoast. At the urging of The Wire, for 28 short days during the darkest and coldest month of the year, area musicians challenged themselves to write and record at least 10 songs or 35 minutes of new material. Participants poured their energy into four-track recorders, laptops and professional studios. Some projects took all month to complete, and some were done in one day. Some brought musicians together who never would have known each other before, and others were solitary endeavors. Creativity exploded.

For me, the RPM Challenge was a way to get my feet wet. Like myself, many of the musicians were recording for the first time, figuring there was no better time to start than the present. The feeling of “everybody else is doing it, so why can’t I?” undoubtedly pushed many of us to jump in. I wrote and recorded an album called “Perfectly Sharpened #2 Pencils,” an effort I’m wholly proud of, though it’s definitely cringe-worthy at points. A friend of mine named Dan Levine, in Worcester, Mass., recorded the 10 songs for free in his makeshift bedroom studio using a recording program on his laptop called Digital Performer. We worked long hours and shoved everything else aside for the entire month. My voice was raspy, my fingers hurt from playing so much guitar, and by the end of it I couldn’t stand the sound of my own songs. But holding the finished project in my hand was more amazing than anything I’d ever felt. Sour notes and flubbed chords aside, I’d done it.

“My main problem about putting off music is that I keep waiting for something to happen, or to have some experience that seems interesting enough, or has a deep enough emotional impact on me for me to need to write a song,” says Christopher Holt, a singer/songwriter from Amesbury, Mass., who performs under the moniker Moons of Jupiter. Having a deadline showed him and other participants that you can use what you have today, right here and right now, and make it art.

February came and went amid much blogging on www.rpmchallenge.com, and as contributors poured into The Wire office on March 1, 2006, the possibilities for local music seemed endless, like RPMers could take over the world with their self-designed cover art and sloughs of burned CDs. Triumph was in the air. For once, musicians, with the support of each other and their families, put the music first. 

 From the natural high that occurred upon completion of my album, I expected thunderbolts from the heavens and a record producer to come knocking at my door. Instead, the creative edge and confidence that came with participating in the challenge pushed me to play more shows than I’d played in the previous four years combined and to finally form a band, which I’d wanted to do for years.

Other musicians felt that burst of confidence, as well. “Everyone was really positive and really encouraging,” says singer/songwriter Christy Hobin. “There was a real ‘You can do it’ attitude. That seems so rare in a world of increasing pessimism.” For many musicians, just putting themselves out there was the hardest part. Hobin realized that people weren’t going to ridicule her or her music. “Most people have a lot of positive things to say about it,” she confirms.

“I felt like I was a part of an amazing community of artists,” says Tim Webb, of Kittery, Maine, who released a solo bass recording called “Art Project” for RPM. “I never had the complete vision to see my own projects through before RPM,” says Webb, who had played for years with other musicians. Through the RPM process, he met saxophone player Thom Keith, of neighboring Eliot, Maine, and the two have joined forces in a band called Equal Time along with drummer Mike Walsh and trombonist Derek Kwong. Webb says that he and Keith were “separated at birth” and RPM allowed them to find each other. 

After February, Keith and Webb formed a group called Avant Coast, which tries to move creative, improvisational music into the public eye and encourages collaboration between local musicians. The group presented a show in Kittery last fall, and on Feb. 23, they are starting a new music series in the Lotus Rising dance studio at the Mills at Salmon Falls in Rollinsford. “RPM came at a point where I was really interested in finding my own voice,” Webb says. Equal Time will be making an RPM album again this year—once again, the challenge starts on Feb. 1—and Webb may pursue another solo project.

Collaboration became one of the project’s defining characteristics.

Exeter’s John Herman embodied that spirit with his band, The Man Who Was Thursday. Herman’s day job is teaching English at a local high school, and his list of hobbies includes acting, directing, producing television shows and writing for magazines, but he has never been a musician. Feeling the fire of RPM and wanting to include himself in the action, Herman asked several friends to help him make an album. “I wanted the album to be an experiment in collaboration,” Herman says. “I’ve always been surrounded by musicians.” He contacted four friends who live in New Hampshire and also an Italian band called Turnpike Glow. Herman sent each of the musicians a series of challenges that they took and wrote music around.

The band’s name came from G.K. Chesterton’s 1907 novel of the same title, which Herman was reading at the time of RPM ’06. The plot of the book involves an underground society of anarchists who name themselves after days of the week. “I was really embracing the secretive nature of the novel,” Herman says.      

Herman ended up playing trombone and doing some vocals on the project. “I got out of my comfort zone a little bit,” he says. 

After the success of his RPM project, Herman took The Man Who Was Thursday to a global scale, asking more than 25 musicians from around the world to participate in a series of musical challenges in which they only have seven days to complete a piece of music. To advertise his endeavor, Herman used the classifieds Web site www.craigslist.org. None of the participating musicians knew what they were making music for, and they never had contact with each other. Some are from various towns and cities in New Hampshire and Maine, but others are from Canada, Mexico, Italy and every corner of United States. The Man Who Was Thursday completed its project at the end of 2006. Herman is releasing songs online at www.johnherman.org/themanwhowasthursday.html, and the work is included in an iArt exhibit at the Axiom Gallery in Jamaica Plain, Mass., through March 9.

Herman doesn’t yet know what his RPM ’07 contribution will be. “I’m excited to challenge myself with something new and different,” he says. “Last year I didn’t know what I was doing until the week before.”

Joseph K. Murphy of the pop band Murkadee participated in The Man Who Was Thursday for RPM ’06. He also helped engineer Amos Clapp’s RPM album, “Opinions on Horses,” on which he also played. “For the whole month of February, I was working on music,” Murphy says. “I converted my bedroom into a live room since I didn’t have any other space at the time.” Murphy slept on the floor and eventually a couch by the end of the month.

“By the end of it, I was burned out on recording,” Murphy says. “I went to see a friend, drummer Mike D’Errico, play at a UNH Jazz concert and I had a bit of musical breakdown.” The experience was so emotional that Murphy stopped recording and just played for four months. “I went right up to the edge during last year’s challenge and might have fallen over right after,” he says. Murphy survived and is back making music.

While some musicians recorded for the first time, seasoned professionals like Portsmouth’s Laurel Brauns participated in RPM just to try something different. With two studio albums already under her belt, Brauns’s RPM album “Roisin Dubh” was recorded in just one night. “The biggest influence RPM had for me was setting deadlines for creative projects,” Brauns says. “I always put off writing because I feel guilty about doing it instead of working on something that will pay the rent. RPM really helped me bust out of that way of thinking.” Brauns used only her guitar and voice, recorded together in one track, using one microphone.

“It was much more about songwriting than experimenting with production,” Brauns says. “It created a really intimate sound that I like and will try to incorporate more on future albums.” Making the album herself gave her more confidence to trust her own ears and tastes. Six of the songs that Brauns recorded for RPM ended up on her new studio album, “Closed for the Season,” which will be released on Feb. 10. For RPM ’07, she plans to record an EP with electronic musician Aaron Bacon. He will write the music and she will do the singing and lyric writing. “It’s the idea of working towards a goal with a deadline,” Brauns says. “That’s definitely inspired by RPM.” Because of her and Bacon’s busy schedules, she says they may not complete the project by March 1.     

While Brauns takes what she learned from RPM last year and applies it to her new projects, Amesbury singer/songwriter Christopher Holt, a.k.a. Moons of Jupiter, is looking forward to creating another album in 28 days. His effort last year was a 10-song disc entitled “I Am Joyous, I Am Scared: Songs in Reference to the Film ‘Punch Drunk Love’ that he recorded using the ProTools program on his home computer. Holt procrastinated until the last week of February, then made the album in seven days. “I wanted to prove to myself that I was capable of doing this,” he says.

At points, creating the album wasn’t easy, and Holt had to change gears a few times before deciding on the final course of the record. Putting himself into someone else’s experience helped to push him in the right direction. “The preparation for it was laying in bed for a few days watching ‘Punch Drunk Love’ over and over again with a notebook, trying to get inside Adam Sandler’s character and write lyrics from his perspective.” As a result of the album, Holt was invited to play a short tour with the band Tiger Saw in 2006.

Holt says the best part about participating in RPM was discovering great musicians and making new friends, feeling that sense of community that is so important for music-makers. “I played a song from ‘I am Joyous, I am Scared’ last week at the open mike I host in Amesbury, and this guy came up to me after and told me he thought it was a really great song,” Holt says. “This sort of thing rarely happens to me. That makes it all worth it.” Holt plans on working on another album for RPM this year, promising himself that he’ll work hard the whole 28 days, instead of letting time get away from him.

Moons of Jupiter’s RPM album established Christopher Holt as a talented newcomer to the scene, but Portsmouth’s Jose Duque is a seasoned veteran. He is the founder of ZumbaTres, a Latin jazz band, and he plays with the Randy Armstrong Ensemble and TJ Wheeler, among other notable acts. His latest project is Roman(US), in which he plays with his cousin Felix Duque. Felix lives in Barcelona, and the pair recorded Roman(US)’s electronica-infused RPM album “Sound Postcards” on two different continents. The cousins worked on songs separately, playing keyboards and composing, and sent each other files over the Internet. Utilizing programs like Abelton Live, Sony Vegas and Pro Tools, there were very few real instruments used in the recording. The addition of guitars by a friend named Roidan in Caracas, Venezuela, an alto saxaphone courtesy of Russ Grazier in Portsmouth, and an Indian sitar played by Randy Armstrong of Barrington rounded out the recording. “The idea of RPM seemed really far-fetched and wacky enough that I was going to do it by myself, but I started thinking about how in the late ’90s, I worked with my cousin writing and producing some of his songs for a possible album,” Duque says. Jose called Felix, told him about the challenge and asked him to help make an album.

Duque says that making an RPM album has made him experiment with a new type of writing. “My cousin’s rock aggressiveness and my jazz sensibility blended so well that we’re looking for a record label in Europe to sign us and keep producing this type of music,” Jose says. “Making the RPM album took my creativity to a different space.”

During the recording process, Duque was also writing songs for a new jazz album with ZumbaTres, and Felix was in Europe recording with his progressive rock band RC2 and simultaneously editing a DVD of European concerts. “We never really rested or slept, but we finished it on time,” Jose says. The two continue to constantly write songs for the Roman(US) project, and plan on participating in the RPM Challenge in 2007. The cousins will once again exchange sound files over the Internet for another stressful month. Though Jose is deep in the midst of a marketing campaign for ZumbaTres’s latest album, “Far Away,” and Felix is finishing his band’s album, they are both excited to pursue the musical relationship.

The Duque cousins may have been frustrated trying to deal with an ocean between them, but Foxlove’s Elizabeth Antalek and Chris Greiner had to cope with a host of problems that included everything from not having a workable recording space to trying to jam everything into the last possible night. Greiner was one of the chief organizers of the Challenge and still managed to record a 12-song, split LP with Foxlove and his own solo singer/songwriter project, Northern.

The album, titled “Tale-End of Winter,” was recorded in “one long, rather miserable night,” as Antalek says, on a laptop in Greiner’s kitchen. Technical problems nearly derailed the project, but the duo finished just in time. “Who wants to admit defeat right before the finish line?” Antalek asks. Refusing to admit defeat means living with an album that may not be perfect, but is definitely complete. The two may re-record the material at some point in the future, and both are going to participate in RPM again this year. Greiner is focusing on two full-length projects and is also devoting more time to organizing the Challenge itself. The duo has also played a couple of shows and has an EP for sale.

While Antalek and Greiner initially collaborated to make their RPM album, solo singer/songwriter Christy Hobin’s album gave her the confidence and skills she needed to eventually form a band. Still unnamed, the band consists of bass player Zach Smith of Portsmouth, drummer Shawn Roussin of Exeter, and Hobin, who is also from Portsmouth.

“From RPM I learned all about MySpace,” Hobin says. Hobin put some of her songs up, then received an e-mail from Roussin that said he wanted to be in a band with her. “I also got booked and actually played some gigs,” she says.

“The thought of doing a project alone was totally overwhelming for me,” Hobin says. “I questioned everything from my abilities to the lack of time do it. I picked up a copy of The Wire that week and read all about the project. I figured this many musicians could not be wrong.” Hobin signed up on the Web site and decided to record her album at Thundering Sky Studios in South Berwick, Maine, given her lack of equipment and limited time. “I’m still paying for it,” she says. “I didn’t know anyone or anywhere where I could record for free.”

Hobin was so excited to complete her project that she got pulled over for speeding at 1 a.m. on March 1 after she left her last studio session. “I don’t even remember if I got a warning or an actual ticket,” she says. “I was so proud to have accomplished something music-related all by myself.”

One of the musicians who had the most creative output in the challenge is Portsmouth’s Guy Capecelatro III, whose album “February” included 28 tracks, one for each day of the month. He promises his project this year will be just as grand in scope. Since completing “February,” Capecelatro has written over 40 more songs and has played out more than he had in years. In November 2006, he played out seven times.

RPM forced Capecelatro to learn the computer program Garageband, something he’d been putting off. He recorded the album at home on his iMac. “It tingled my sense of competition,” Capecelatro says. “Knowing that so many musicians were working similarly was reassuring. Without that sense of vague musical community, it would have seemed insurmountable.” Capecelatro didn’t start recording until Feb. 8, then worked frantically until the last day when he wrote and recorded four songs and mixed the entire album.

Having such a short amount of time forced Capecelatro to fully immerse himself in the writing process, without being overly concerned about editing. “It was all just throw it down and move on,” Capecelatro says. For his 2007 RPM album, he is putting together bits of old and new writing to form songs, as well writing about random old photographs he’s collected over the year. Michael Lesy’s book “Wisconsin Death Trip” is also going to inform some of his work.   

While Capecelatro challenged himself to write a song every day, Moes Haven members Matt Farley and Tom Scalzo went a step further, writing and recording an entirely new 30-minute album every day of 2006. Their RPM effort, which combined the best songs from each day’s albums for the month of February, is called “February: From the Bayou to the Barnyard and Back.”

Keyboardist/vocalist Farley lives in Manchester and guitarist Scalzo lives in Boston. The two met at Providence College the late 1990s, started making music, and haven’t stopped since. For RPM, they used a stand-alone digital recorder called a Roland VS-880-Ex Digital Workstation.  

“We’ve always had self-imposed deadlines,” Farley says. “But this was the biggest project we’ve ever done by far. “Where we might have otherwise written 20 good songs in 2006, this project helped us write upwards of 200.”

Farley admits it was hard to write and record every single day. “It’s never going to sound as great as you imagine it when you start,” he says. “But an album that’s half as good as you imagined is at least better than an album you never finish.” The daily albums might not contain Moes Haven’s best material, but “it’s good exercise to make bad music,” he says. Due to their stress last year, Farley says he and Scalzo will not be participating in RPM this year and will not release another album for five years.

“We’re going to continue to record, but we’re keeping it to ourselves until 2012,” Farley says. “The working title of the project is ‘Stromboli’s Alarm Clock.’ However, starting Friday, Feb. 2, the duo is going to listen to each of the 365 albums they created last year, one after another. That’s a complete eight days of music if they listen 24 hours a day

While Moes Haven recorded so much material last February that they had to cull it down to make a single album, Rochester’s The Digbees chose to write and record something entirely different than they usually write. “We’ve had a very interesting year as a result of RPM,” Bruce Hilton says. Rather than rush its more serious rock ’n’ roll material, The Digbees chose to write and record an album full of spoofs on Beatles songs, which they dubbed “Beat the Meetles: The Stinky Blackwater Tapes.” As part of the fun, the band wrote a back story about a man named Harold “Stinky” Blackwater from whom The Beatles stole all their musical ideas. 

“It was incredibly well received, perhaps even more than our ‘serious’ projects,” Hilton says. “It drew quite a bit of attention from the RPM crowd.” The band listed the CD on eBay in the Beatles CDs and memorabilia categories. The response was so good that they had 1,000 copies of the disc professionally pressed. The band has enjoyed airplay on www.Beatlesarama.com, an online Beatles radio station that is featured on iTunes and gets upwards of eight million hits per month. Copies of the CD are owned by members of Beatles cover bands Beatlejuice, 1964 the Tribute and Monty Python’s Eric Idle.

Many of the 2006 participants are returning to participate in RPM once again, including The Digbees, who are planning “Stinky II: the Off-White Album.” Scores of first-time participants have also signed up, pushing the number of projects to more than 300 so far. People from all over the world have committed to the challenge, including Dustin Rider, who currently lives in Alaska. Last year, when Rider still lived on the Seacoast, his band The Founders wrote and recorded their album “Foundation.” He will record this year as the Terrace Mountain Boys, a one-man-band.

Last year, RPM gave hundreds of artists a reason to make great music. RPM 2007 promises a diversity of artists who will once again use whatever resources they have to put their ideas on tape. To watch it all unfold, or to join, visit www.rpmchallenge.com.

RPM Kick-Off Party
ready to write your RPM album? 

All participating musicians, whether you’ve signed up yet or not, are welcome to the RPM Kick-Off Party,  Tuesday, Jan. 30, 7 p.m., at Bourbon’s, 21 Congress St., Portsmouth. For more information, call The Wire at 603-427-0403.

who’s participating?
Check out the global map at www.rpmchallenge.com.