Freeloader: Rough Cuts from FAWM

February is generally a shitty month: The hangover from New Year's is long gone, it's cold, dark and especially depressing for single people and non-skiers. Luckily, the reclusive urges this month brings are paying off for the local musicians involved in the February Album Writing Month (FAWM) project.

This year, more than sixty Colorado musicians are holing up and working their asses of in hopes of meeting the FAWM challenge of fourteen songs in 28 days. The Fawmers (nifty name eh?) are given weekly motivational challenges (like writing from the perspective of an inanimate object) and are encouraged to collaborate with one another to fuel creative levels.

Each artist has a profile page in the FAWM community where they post their lyrics or rough demos as they complete them and where listeners can download them for free. When all is said and done, fourteen songs are selected from thousands to be on the annual "fawmpilation" album (check out past releases here).

And with 3,280 songs uploaded into the worldwide jukebox thus far, FAWM is a songwriter's wet dream and an audiophile's eargasm.

We got particularly, er, excited about these local endeavors: The Vinyl Files (Kerry Olson) - The Noise Can Come on In stuart (Stuart Confer) - Super Model Cocaine Factory jefff (Jeff Fal) - That's Why I'm an Architect