song a day toolkit
Jonathan Mann’s “Song A Day” began on January 1, 2009, as a whimsical New Year’s resolution: write, record, and publish one original song every single day. What started as a lighthearted experiment quickly transformed into a rigorous creative discipline and, over time, a living historical record. Day after day Jonathan confronts the same blank canvas, armed with a guitar, a microphone, and whatever inspiration the world offers. Within hours, he publishes his finished track to YouTube, social feeds, and his own website, filing yet another sonic snapshot into an ever-growing public archive.
The raw scale of the undertaking is staggering. Sixteen years of daily practice have produced more than five-thousand nine-hundred songs. Some compositions are whimsical earworms about Internet memes, kitchen mishaps, or Jonathan’s fascination with weird news; others grapple with intimate milestones such as marriage, parenthood, or the loss of cultural heroes. Collectively they form an audio diary through which listeners can trace world events—pandemics, elections, Apple keynotes, the rise of Bitcoin—filtered through Jonathan’s melodic sensibility.
Yet “Song A Day” is about far more than endurance. The ritual embodies Jonathan’s core philosophy of showing up and choosing momentum over perfection. Because tomorrow demands a fresh composition, today’s song cannot languish in revision hell; mistakes become charming artifacts, and half-formed ideas gain dignity by being shared. That transparency demystifies creativity for thousands of viewers who battle their own inner critics. Every upload quietly whispers, “Just hit publish.” Over time the project teaches that creative confidence is not a spark but a muscle built through small, deliberate reps completed in public.
Technology is both tool & playground for Jonathan. He livestreams songwriting sessions, invites chat suggestions, and shares stems under Creative Commons so remixers can join the party. He has performed daily songs on CNN, had a song used by Steve Jobs at an Apple Keynote, and minted his entire catalog as one-of-one Ethereum NFTs, pioneering the marriage of music and blockchain long before “web3 music” trended. His videos and thumbnails live on IPFS for decentralized permanence, while Farcaster Frames let collectors place real-time bids inside social feeds. Recently he released his own replacement: An autonomous AI songwriter that was trained on his corpus.
Piece by piece, Jonathan has built a "Toolkit" that automates away the drudgery of daily tasks that surround Song A Day: Uploading, cataloging, minting, sharing. Now, with the help of funds from Allied Arts, Jonathan and his developer are turning this piecemeal toolkit into a full fledged app that other artists can use.
