San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
A song a day keeps pandemic boredom at bay
U2’s “New Year’s Day” was an easy choice. So was Earth Wind and Fire’s “September” (“Do you remember/ the 21st night of September?”)
But Joey Liechty’s pandemic passion to find a song with a connection to every single day of the calendar year wasn’t always so simple. Sometimes he had to stretch the definition of a “connection” for what he came to call The Song Calendar project. (You try finding a song that references Oct. 11.)
But he got them all, and since Jan. 1, he’s been releasing the list, one song a day, on his Twitter feed, @thesongcalendar. Because he wants the list to be usable for any year, he also included one for Leap Day, Feb. 29.
The 36-year-old software developer in Denton concedes the project doesn’t have any grand meaning, but he thinks music lovers will enjoy the daily releases and being introduced to musicians they may not have heard before.
A self-confessed collector (records, laser discs, mugs) who loves nothing more than compiling lists (triple homonyms: flu, flew, flue and by, buy, bye), Liechty said working on the four-month project helped clear his mind and deal with being cooped up during the pandemic.
“It helped relieve stress because I enjoyed the process of doing the research and filling in the slots,” he said. “And I found it satisfying to have a creative outlet, if you want to call it that, of making this derivative work out of the work by these original artists.”
Liechty credits The Song Calendar idea to his girlfriend, Katherine Treff. Last summer, while listening to “June 9th” by the Scottish electronic duo Boards of Canada, she wondered aloud how many songs invoke a specific day by title, lyrics or reference.
He immediately glommed onto the idea and got to work trying to fill in the blank for every day of the year.
“I started with my own music knowledge and going through my iTunes playlist,” said Liechty, who has been a professional DJ for 15 years. “Then I went online to Google and the song lyric websites.” (Disclosure: He also found a similar attempt this writer tried — and failed — to complete on the now-defunct Favorite Office Time Wasters blog.)
Toward the end, Liechty turned to Wikipedia for unfilled dates to find events that happened that someone, at some time, sang about.
“I’d go down the list and crossreference high-profile things like the first launch of the Space Shuttle Columbia (April 12, “Countdown” by Rush) or the 1975 sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald freighter during a storm on Lake Superior (Nov. 9, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot).”
In addition to the song name, artist and YouTube link (when available), each day’s Twitter entry includes a fun fact or observation about the song. For
Jan. 20, he wrote, “One of the more amorphous, yet decidedly post-punk bands of all time,
Mark E. Smith’s The Fall released ‘City Dweller’ in 1994.”
As the project progressed, Liechty developed a set of simple, self-imposed rules to determine what makes an acceptable song-date connection. First, it had to be a real song that’s part of a record release, preferably in English. And it had to make an indisputable reference to a specific date.
The resulting songs are from just about every era of recorded music. Six songs on the list were released as recently as 2020 while the oldest is Leadbelly’s “The Hindenburg Disaster,” recorded in 1937.
While many songs obviously made the cut (“Happy Valentine’s Day” by Outkast, “July 12, 1939” by Charlie Rich) others, while not as specific, were still fairly obvious, at least to anyone knowledgeable about popular music.
Take the entry for Feb. 3, Don McLean’s “American Pie,” which Liechty said “is probably the
song with the most historical juice.” The lyrics refer to “the day the music died” in 1959 when early rockers Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper were killed in a plane crash.
On the day after Christmas, Liechty added the final song to the list, Todd Rundgren’s “Terra Firma” with its lyrics, “I am on Apollo 7 / heading into space.” Apollo 7 lifted off on Oct. 11, 1968.
Liechty said it was cathartic slipping that final piece of the puzzle into place. But the feeling didn’t last long. Because now he’s well into a new project, making a list of 366 films in which either a major plot point, line of dialogue or some other item references a specific date.
Liechty and a friend also have started a 12-episode podcast, one a month, called The Song Calendar Podcast. It will be available beginning today on iTunes and other platforms.
Liechty also is putting together a supercut of snippets of songs with dates and other references from all 366 songs on the list.
Stay tuned.