Coming November 2022
Songw3rks is the name of Art & Pete’s “crowdsourced original music” project. The idea was to see if Art & Pete could produce ten original songs, live, in front of an audience. With creative input from Twitch’s live chat, and Art Mayes patched in through Discord audio, the songs were written in real-time on the Brookstone Bards Twitch Show. Audience members chose the Genre, Style, Key, Title, and Lyrics. Each song was crafted during its own Twitch session, using input from chat along with the guidance of Art & Pete. Once the tenth song was written, Art & Pete hand-picked some of Charlotte, NC’s best musicians to lend their talents at The Wav Lab in Fort Mill, SC with the lofty goal of recording all ten songs in just one week. The musicians were given charts and demos and told to “make it their own” prior to their arrival at the studio. What followed was the organic and unique arrangements of the songs known as Songw3rks, Vol. 1.
photo by James Eric Laczkowski
Songwriter, musician, actor, director, author, and professional builder of creative playgrounds. Art was trained as a lawyer, taught himself to code, and has worked as an iOS architect and developer since closing his law firm. He asked Pete to come to Chicago to record a song they wrote 20 years ago, and this happened.
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Mission Statement
It’s time for a new chapter. Art & Pete are bringing great artists together to make great art. For too long, commerce has been a perverse master of creativity, bending it to the will of an imaginary “demographic”. Pasting labels on it, like a trope is somehow scientific. But genre is as imaginary as race, given import according to whom it excludes.
We are post-genre.
And culture is limited to who can afford it. ASCAP sues bars for playing unlicensed songs; meanwhile, we clearly want to share and sample and create— to be a part of the things we enjoy. To that end, we are licensing our songs for covers and samples.
We have two requests: 1) attribute Art & Pete; 2) share the final product with us.
And one demand: Be fair. If you make a bunch of money using something we create, be fair.
Underground radio stations, same deal.
Big-ass corporate radio stations (et. al.) should accept the same license with the same caveats, and then reach out to us. You are in it for the money, so you’re going to share it.
The rest of us, I think, are in it to play. To dance. To draw. To sing. You know, childish things.