EVERY SONG I’VE EVER WRITTEN: KARAOKE NIGHT

From 1985 to 2004, PME-ART co-artistic director Jacob Wren wrote songs. Lots and lots of songs. Then he completely stopped. At the time not very many people heard them. In a way, because hardly anyone heard them, we might say that these songs don’t yet exist. Every Song I’ve Ever Written is a project about memory, history, things that may or may not exist, songwriting, the internet and pop culture.

Every Song I’ve Ever Written is a project with four parts:

1: A WEBSITE everysongiveeverwritten.com where you can listen to and download all the songs Jacob wrote between 1985 to 2004. You can also record your own versions, send them to him, and he will post them on the site.

2: KARAOKE NIGHT where anyone can sing one of Jacob’s songs Karaoke-style, accompanied by Jacob on guitar.

3: SOLO PERFORMANCE in which Jacob performs all of the songs he’s ever written in chronological order (it takes about five hours.) When put together these songs form a picture not just of Jacob’s life but also of the decades during which they were written.

4: BAND NIGHT where five local bands of different genres each cover one of Jacob’s songs, making it their own. After they perform the song there will be an interview in which Jacob asks the band what it was like to cover the song and the band can ask Jacob what it was like to write it.

For Fusebox we are presenting Karaoke Night and Band Night on the following dates:

BAND NIGHT: Wednesday, April 6, 9pm Festival Hub

KARAOKE NIGHT: Friday, April 8, 11pm Festival Hub

PME-ART are not doing this because they think these are the best songs ever (we hope at least a few of them are good.) They are doing this because hardly anyone heard them at the time, and they are wondering if there is some new, strange way to bring them out into the world. In doing so they hope to raise a few questions about what songs mean on the internet, about what songwriting is actually like today, and to take a sidelong glance back at the recent past.