Do I want to fall in love again? Yes. Do I want to move to my own space and reclaim my independence? Also yes. This song's about wanting both, and not knowing which is going to come first.

Sure, You Can Love Me (But Can You Please Take Me Home?) (July 2023)

We're more than halfway through July so you could barely call this my "June" song but I have done this challenge for far too long to give up completely. It's been an incredibly busy few weeks. I caught wind of a local songwriting competition and I entered another song of mine that I wrote as part of the 2021 iteration of this song-a-month challenge. That has been taking up most of my musical resources since about mid-June. I had a new song percolating a few weeks ago when the timing for my June song would have made more sense, but I lost the chords/lyrics in a fight with my laptop and the phone-recorded snippet that was left behind felt lacking when I revisited it. Ironically enough, this late into July, all I've got in me is yet another phone-recorded demo. A friend of mine has been going though a rough patch and unfortunately, I can relate. When we were talking about it, he dropped a line about a house of cards blowing over in the wind, and I took that and ran with it.

House of Cards (June 2024)

Started in July, didn't finish 'til August. The last song I was able to finish for the year of 2024 before burning out. I had been doing this challenge since 2020, 1 song per month, every single month since then. "Maritime Law" goes back to the themes of me wanting to escape my life in a big city in Ontario to the East Coast where my stress tends to melt away and everything is a little less intense.

Maritime Law (July 2024)

I became fascinated with a person I met last year at a songwriting event and thought playing with the idea of a "Bombshell" in the context of a beautiful person/dangerous weapon would be a fun idea to explore. So I delved a little bit into this type of person and it turned into this weird lusty warning of a song. Pretty happy with how it turned out.

Bombshell (January 2025)

I had a seed of an idea for this one brewing for a while just based on the concept of "I'm a hopeless romantic, with emphasis on the hopeless part." Thought that was clever and sad and ripe with possibility for a song. Took me a while to craft something around it and oddly enough the last line about being not sleeping because I was too excited to wake up put a hopeful spin on it. Didn't think that's the direction I would go, but I did. And it's also a shitty phone demo (as, to be honest, most of my submissions in previous years have been and will probably continue to be.)

Heavy on the Hopeless (February 2025)

This was the earliest I have had a song finished for the month in a while but I'm still posting late. I wanted to get a more full “studio” type demo with better instrumentation so I recorded the guitar part and played with effects and it was sounding good. Had a cool idea or the bass part too. But the drums (the one instrument in the equation that I can’t play) were very tricky. Logic’s smart drums were struggling with the tempo vs. tone interplay I was trying to accomplish, and I just got frustrated. So yet another acoustic demo this month. This one was written to contend with some feelings right after learning what had become of the house I used to share with my ex and, deciding it may be healthy to cut ties completely.

Ghosts (March 2025)

So here is the very late "finished" product of my April song...I put "finished" in quotes because I probably need a bridge, but being that I'm a week and a half late, we're just calling a spade a spade a spade at this point. I keep revisiting this same passive-aggressive theme raging against a past relationship and I think that well has finally run dry for the moment. Although I will say I'm pretty happy with my output this years so far as compared to last year just in general terms of songwriting. We'll see how the rest of the year goes...

Goodnight Princess (April 2025)

Too (June 2025)

Tonight (July 2025)

Whiplash (August 2025)

One Step Back (May 2025)

A demo of a tune I'm hoping to put on my next CD.

Candy Shell

Acoustic pop with some folksy elements, a little soul and everything in between. Think of it as a delicious musical gumbo.

Joe Chammas

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