page_title: David Strackany
section_title: Song a Day project
hierarchical_section_title: David Strackany / Music career / Song a Day project
caption_attribution_description: Dick Cheney, Vice President of the United States.
context_page_description: Paleo, aka David Strackany, is an American singer of folk music who is notable for writing a song every day for 365 days using a "half-size children's guitar" while living out of his car and being essentially homeless. He plays acoustic guitar and sings and in 2005 began touring the United States. He has a recording arrangement with an indie music label named Partisan Records.
context_section_description: Strackany generated media attention by doing a year-long write-a-song-a-day project. He did this while touring the United States nationally and driving more than 50,000 miles from Easter Day on April 16, 2006 to April 15, 2007 and playing more than 200 concerts. Paleo's "The Song Diary" project was similar to a feat achieved by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks in 2003 and it was covered by news sources including USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, Magnet Magazine, Paste Magazine, the Chicago Sun Times, the New York Post,  NPR Morning Edition, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, in addition to regional and local papers. A National Public Radio music critic wrote:
  Every day for a year, he wrote, recorded and posted a song on his Web site. He hasn't been writing songs in his bedroom, either. During the last year, Paleo drove more than 50,000 miles and played more than 200 concerts. Along the way, he wrote the lyrics and played his guitar — in his van, backstage, whenever he could find a moment. Paleo calls his yearlong project a song diary, but if these songs are all autobiographical, then the year has taken a toll on his psyche. -- Deborah Amos in NPR, 2007
  Paleo made rules for himself:
  The Song Diary would end if he skipped even one day.
  Each song had to be recorded before sunrise.
  No songs could be re-recorded.
  'Sunday Prayer' songs were new lyrics sung with the same melody every Sunday.
  He refused to sleep "until he had completely documented a new song for that day regardless of the circumstances," according to his recollection. The result was an "enormous body of work" with an "outlook of unfettered optimism." It is downloadable in its entirety from his website. Paste Magazine described it as "a streetfight of freakish prolificacy." He received a letter of congratulations from American vice-president Dick Cheney who had heard about the project. Cheney wrote:
  Writing 365 songs in 365 days is a feat that took determination and dedication. -- Dick Cheney, 2007
  Strackany described the project as psychoanalytically transformative in a personal way:
  I feel like a completely different person than when I started out. It was grace, like I died and came back. My perspective on my relationship to love and to art and to my family has totally changed. You have to consider that I spent every second of every day of a whole year in a sort of constant state of catharsis, what seemed like never-ending auto-psychoanalysis. I walked into the Diary maybe a little desperate, certainly insecure, and I walked out on a cloud. -- Paleo, 2007
  Strackany sees a benefit to creativity in songwriting when there are limits attached. He emphasized that boundaries are a "great way to excite your creativity" and suggested, in an example, that cutting off two of the guitar's six strings could help a writer creatively. He noted that "too much freedom can be every bit the cage."
caption: Paleo received a letter of congratulations from VP Dick Cheney after completing his marathon yearlong song-a-day project.
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