I've made a lot of songs and albums. 23 releases. One year I released 87 songs to the public. And while it's been fine to just go by the seat of my pants, I've found my organization skill lacking when it comes to bigger album projects. Be it my ADHD or my lack of any sort of business/organizational training, I've always struggled with this stuff. I hope you find my journey to find a system that works best for my needs to be an interesting read.
A brief history on how I've organized my songs
Bandcamp drafts
Bandcamp drafts are kind of a default for me. If I want to release a new album, I used to start with what I imagine the title will be on my bandcamp page, followed by what I thought the tracklist was going to look like. I was basically doing the worst possible format of expecting work to be done just by talking about it, and getting frustrated when the song I needed finished in the album didn't get done.
So I tried a different approach. I started with the music and would start to anticipate albums once I had a few songs put together. But even this would change frequently as the album gained tracks and the overall "vibe" of the album shifted.
I think this kind of volatility in any project is inevitable, and really there was no issue for me to keep re-downloading my songs at $0 PWYW and re-uploading them to other albums or even other bandcam pages. It was tedious but it felt appropriate to add tedium so I had to really consider where all these songs were going.
I always felt kind of "beholden" to keep my albums tonally consistent, and that meant regularly re-evaluating my songs and listening to my unfinished albums with different tracklists regularly. I think trying to listen to my songs in the album format was always a plus, as you I'd feel compelled to fill in the gaps when the album felt like it dropped in intrigue or if a song was missing like a final solo section that would've made for a good high-point on the album.
Bandcamp has a nasty habit of penalizing your indecision though. Name two albums or two tracks the same thing without deleting one first, and it'll append a "-2" to the URL. It's really hard to get rid of, and the only way to guarantee it doesn't happen is to only upload your songs once they're "done". Y'know, the thing that basically never happens.
Outside of bandcamp, all my ideas for my songs, my lyrics, my tracklists, those would find their ways into sketchbooks, into the lyrics section of my unfinished songs, in my notes app, and sometimes as plaintext files on my laptop. I think I had a turning point once I realized just how much work I was putting into these songs, and how scattered my information about each song was getting.
Spreadsheets
So after having done this bandcamp balancing act for years, sometimes even putting draft lyrics in my songs, it was only around 2021 when I realized that externalizing my album draft planning was probably a better move than winging it.
In general, having multiple songs on the backburner is a hard thing to organize.
Initially I thought it was important for me to stop re-ordering my songs between albums, as I'd often make a song intended for one album and have it feel like it belongs elsewhere once a different album takes shape - but that to me feels like it's become less of a problem as I get more honed at attacking certain genres and styles in my works.
I had a big spreadsheet of songs for a while, but that got untenable to maintain when I made a new song. Even when everything worked as intended, it still felt like I wasn't really accomplishing much by moving rows around and changing the tags on each row.
I was still kind of onto something for bandcamp drafts and their simplicity/immediacy. So getting out of this spreadsheet hell took time. I needed something that sped up the process and didn't require more effort on my part, and if anything consolidated my efforts across files/spreadsheets into something big and simple.
At last, the mission control
It wasn't until 2023 that I came up with the idea of a "mission control" Google Doc. The idea being that it's just a text document, and anything that I want to tinker with lyric-wise or chord-wise can be adjusted from my phone (while I'm jamming on the guitar) or on my laptop (while I'm recording or producing).
This is what I currently use. Hands down it's been the best for me, especially with headers to skip ahead to certain songs or to add additional production notes outside of the lyrics.
When I feel like it I'll take a screenshot of one of my current mission controls, but they're basically a glorified Game Design Doc with fewer images and no diagrams. Mostly just lyrics, names of songs, and other spare ideas relating to the song. No voice memos, no nested pages, nothing crazy or complicated.
So let's talk about the format in more specific detail:
What does a Mission Control require?
A mission control for me must be 3 things:
- is is the one place I go to update lyrics to a song
- it is a living document that collects everything about the project into one file.
- it must have a good font and colour scheme to entice me to keep using it.
Let's look at #1. It needs to be the one place for finding correct lyrics to a song. I need to be able to pull it up on my phone while recording, or to edit it on my laptop while comping takes and realizing that it's missing something.
I find most of the time, a song's lyrics will change after I've sung it a few times, or after I've spent time away from it. I tend to write verbose, and then singing it in the shower or half-remembering what I wrote ends up being a better summation of what I wanted to say anyways. If it's not a catchy lyric, it doesn't get sung in the shower. So whenever I come up with these new lyric consolidations, or even if I come up with a new idea to fit the same melody, my first spot is either my Google Keep notes (which routinely gets fed into the mission control document) or the mission control itself. I can even put a heading for extra lyrics or spare ideas at the bottom in case there's something I miss about the old lyrics (usually just peace of mind though, I never use them).
Now, #2. The living document needs to be a place where any idea - cover art, lyrics, song themes, packaging, release schedules - can all be found in one place. Too many times I've made a new file for a project's physicals only to have those slip away into the ether to be completely forgotten. There's probably a folder organization system I could adopt to try and cordon off all the project's files into one thing, but truthfully I use google drive for office-type file synchronization between devices, and not for backups or even sharing the files. So just having all the text, ideas, and occasionally images regarding the project in one place lets me feel like I'm building up the project into something larger, and I spend way less time trying to hunt down individual image files or spreadsheets regarding the project, or like how "done" a song is. It's all there for me to read!
I've found a lot of value in actually keeping track of songs that my song reminds me of. Not just for songwriting and lyrics, but for how I'm conveying the song lyrically, and sometimes for production and mixing. If my song sounds like it's just an Alkaline Trio song, you bet that's going in the doc so I know who to turn to for mixing reference later on.
Lastly, #3. At first I enjoyed the mission control but found it a real slog to keep looking at google docs files. I realized that I don't have to be professional and I can find a fun font like Berkshire Swash, and get deep purples in my headers to grab my attention and make me feel more in-tune with the project's goals. Having the cover art on the title page is also a great way to try and encourage the right "vibe" for the work I'm doing.
I've spent way too long in Notion and Coda just trying to automate my areas to be very interactive and fun, but the truth is that a simple word document has done so much good for me that I can't get distracted by trying to make it too pretty or automated. I pick a good colour, a good font, and then I'm done. It's just enough for me to enjoy what I'm looking at, I don't really need images or animations to entice me to keep working. (Though a little Kass desktop buddy would certainly give my motivation a boost, hmm...something to consider for later.)
Thanks for reading. Hope this helped you in your creative planning, or was simply just an interesting read!