2018 was set up to be a slow year for Adam Young. On what he describes as a “lazy New Years Day,” with nothing else that looked terribly pressing on his schedule, he committed himself to a year-long songwriting challenge, ambitiously taking on the self-imposed project of turning out one song a day. The first single from that endeavour, “Corned Beef and Garbage” provides a taste of what to expect from Young in two flavours: a traditional version pairing Young’s Cape Breton style of piano playing against Chrissy Crowley and Colin Grant’s fiddles, and a second more modern New Orleans style with a jaunty beat from Brian Talbot propping up a whole section of woodwinds from Brad Reid.
“I was having a lazy New Year’s Day at home and decided, mainly out of boredom, to write a tune,” says Young. “When that proved easier than expected, I thought, ‘I could do this every day for the next year’… and it became my New Year’s resolution.”
Young says that he surprised himself by sticking with it, having previously only ever managed a New Year’s resolution of a photo-a-day challenge in 2008. In the end, he was left with an awful lot of songs but was faced with a new challenge of getting them out into the world.
“At the end of the year, I had composed more than 365 tunes. There were a couple of days where I wrote two or three, but the minimum requirement of at least one per day was met,” says Young. “When I started, I didn’t have plans for anything to come out of the project, so I had no expectation of what the tunes would sound like, whether they’d be any good, or whether they’d be complete garbage. But with 365+ tunes, at least a couple of them should be half decent?”
For most of 2019, the project was put on hold, and then again in the early part of 2020 when Young stepped in to tour as the key player for Còig. Then, as we all know, the world went topsy-turvy and breathed new life into everyone’s passion projects.
Finally, in December 2020, the songs were able to emerge in a parsed-down tunebook of 189 songs, and Young has since been recording a double-album split between non-traditional songs and reworkings of those same songs in a traditional style.
“Because there was no expectation of how these tunes ‘should’ sound, I decided to take some chances,” says Young. “The first album is the ‘non-trad’ album, featuring arrangements inspired by bluegrass, New Orleans jazz, doo-wop, modern disco, film scores, and classical music, and even old 8-bit video games.
“The traditional album is a bit more manageable, featuring three fiddlers (Chrissy Crowley, Colin Grant and Dara Smith-MacDonald), plus Rankin MacInnis on highland and small pipes on one track, and piano and guitar throughout.”
Young says that in the final tunebook each song is marked with the date that it was written on. Although Young was able to successfully complete his task of a song-a-day, not all of them proved to be winners, and this notation gives an interesting sense of where his better productive streaks fell.
“There was a pretty big risk of this being a complete mess, but I couldn’t be happier with how it actually turned out,” says Young. “Funny enough, even on days when it didn’t strike, I still got it done. It wasn’t good, but that was part of the ‘writing exercise’, I guess. Just do it anyway.
“When I finally got to the review stage, I realized I really liked some tunes I probably would have tossed originally, and ended up quickly getting sick of some of the ones I originally thought were good.”
Since completing the project, Young says he hasn’t bothered to write more than a handful of songs, though that could be attributed to focusing on the task of recording just as much as having exhausted his creative flex.
The album’s first single, “Corned Beef and Garbage” even sounds like a twist on a classic reel from the title alone. Rather, Young explains that the title comes from a glib phrase, tossed out in a Cape Breton pub.
“I’m not a fan of corned beef and cabbage, but neither is Howie MacDonald, apparently. We were at a trad music session at Governors [Pub] and he randomly threw the phrase into a conversation. I thought it was hilarious, but have no recollection of the conversation itself (which was probably ridiculous to begin with),” says Young. “Long story short, the title comes from a conversation with Howie MacDonald that neither of us remembers.”
Considering the track—both versions—are entirely instrumental, it might have been called anything at all. Most importantly, it’s a fun and fascinating look at a song presented two ways and a great taste of things to come.