Liner notes

From April 2007 to April 2008, The Redding Brothers wrote, recorded, and released one new song every single week, every Saturday night at midnight. These are the 53 Songs of The Week.

The Challenge / The Story of The Songs Of The Week

told for the first time by Micah Redding. After completing The Physics of Immortality, and releasing it in March 2007, we were exhausted. Not from the music, but from all the business and paperwork and red tape we’d had to go through for our album release concert, and for touring in general.

We were afraid we’d lost touch with what makes this business awesome: writing songs.

So we set ourselves a challenge. Every week for a year, we’d write, record, and release a new song. In keeping with our nature, we settled on the weekly release date of saturday night at midnight, the very last possible second in any week.

So it was settled, we’d release 53 songs, over the course of 53 weeks, on 53 saturday nights as the clock struck 12.

At first it was hard. Writing a new song every week is hard. Recording it is even harder.

But we got it down. The technology became easier to use, and mixing and recording became faster and faster. We hit a good stride with our song-writing.

Then it got harder. In any strenous activity, you start and immediately realize how hard it is. But then you learn to press on through. Eventually, though, you exhaust that burst of energy, and you realize your task is extremely challenging, and you’re getting burnt out.

But this gave us the opportunity that we’d wanted: to try out different styles and genres, to break our own songwriting and music-making molds. So we branched out; we tried crazy things.

And we even threw in a few extras. Like Gabe singing “The Dog in the Middle of The Road”.

Then we hit our next stride. Our songwriting rose to a new level. Sometimes we were pressed for time, and the recordings didn’t come out quite the way we wanted them to. But the songs underneath were happening.

Approaching the final stretch, I was feeling like digging deeper, and I had been searching for a way to do more and bigger things in the world. I wanted to create and build community. Those last several songs reflected that.

The final song accidentally became symbolic, titled “Exodus”. We wrote it as we finished our challenge, moved on to the next level, and actually physically left the country for the Middle East.

You’ve got to understand our humor. The actual challenge we issued to ourselves was to release a year of songs-of-the-week. A year is not 52 or 53 weeks. It’s 52.177457 weeks. So we had promised to release 52.177457 songs, on 52.177457 saturday nights. Because that’s how long a year actually is, mathematically speaking. And that’s just the kind of people we are, geekily speaking.

So instead of just releasing 53 songs, we released our 52.177457th of a song, precisely .177457th of a week after our 52nd week. That meant sometime early Monday morning. And it was not a full song. It was .177457th of a song.

For the rest of the world not indulging in our little mathematical fantasies, we later released the full version of that song on the 53rd saturday night at midnight.

This is the story told in hindsight. The original call-to-arms — the manifesto as it appeared on the old site when the challenge began — is preserved in the archive: The Song-Of-The-Week Challenge.