The Songbook: Lyrics and Chord Charts, Out of the Folder

There's a new corner of the site: the songbook. It's the songs I've written, laid out as lyric sheets with the chords sitting over the words, one page per song. Mostly it's just the charts, the way I keep them. The GROUNDWORK songs also link out to where the recordings still live.

Here's what's in it and where it came from.

The loose songs

The first set is 52 songs that lived in a folder of song notes. Each one was kept the same way: section labels, chords above the lyric lines, and a block of track information underneath with the tempo, the key, the capocapoA clamp across the guitar neck that raises every string, so the same chord shapes play in a higher key. position and who wrote it.

Some of these are old. The oldest is dated December 2000, a co-write called "Once Again". "Ending of Innocence II" carries a 2010 date. A few files name an album and a track number, and one of them, "The Jester", has a note calling it the only really lo-fi song on the CD. Acoustic, and it doesn't really follow a time signature. Others are much newer and more tidied up.

They're sorted alphabetically, because my notes never gave them an order.

A few things got left out on purpose:

• My left-handed fingering charts. The shapes in my notes were drawn for left-handed playing, which would just confuse most people. The song pages now have standard right-handed chord boxes instead, with a Lefty switch that flips them around for the rest of us.
• Credits and production notes. The mixing ideas, the "add bells in the chorus" reminders and the list of who played what stay in my notes.
• Early drafts. One file, "No Name", turned out to be the first verse and chorus of "At That First Sight", so only the finished version is here.

Heads up

Where my notes had a capo, it's the first line of the chart. The key at the top is whatever my notes said, and on a few songs that's the shape key, not what you'll hear with the capo on.

Analog

The second set is from Analog, a stage musical I've been building. It follows a group of young artists and service workers (a graphic designer, a call-center mom, a journalist, a street musician, a programmer who feels guilty about what he's building) as their jobs get handed to AI, and they fight back to prove the human part still counts.

The show has a planned list of 21 songs. Five of them are finished, and those are the five in the songbook, in running order:

#	Song	Where it sits
1	Side Hustle Symphony	The opening number, everyone mid-hustle
2	Hold Please	Rosa's solo at the call center
3	Optimize Everything	The villain song, in the boardroom
4	Digital Revolution	The Act I finale
5	Analog Heart	The love duet in Act II

"Digital Revolution" was the first song written for the show. The Analog pages look a little different from the loose songs. They're written for a stage, so they keep who's singing each part and the short stage directions, and the chords only sit over the lines where I've actually charted them.

One placeholder survived: Rosa's call center is still just "XYZ Company". It hasn't got a real name yet.

What it isn't

It isn't a finished record. Plenty of these songs have a blank where the tempo or the key should be. "Awkward Poses" has a second and third verse that stop after two lines each, because that's as far as the original got. "The Town" has lyrics and no chords at all. I'd rather put up what exists than fill in the gaps after the fact.

If you want to know how a song gets from an idea to one of these charts, I wrote that up separately in how I write a song. The short answer is that it starts with a drum beat, not a lyric.