Triple M contest forced local musician to churn out new material

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: Triple M contest forced local musician to churn out new material weekly : by Katjusa Cisar | July 7, 2009 | 77 Square : ---------------------------------------------- : : There are two kinds of songwriting for Madison musician Whitney Mann: the kind that comes quickly, and the kind that stretches out torturously for months. : It feels like the difference between "drinking soda on a really hot day versus spilling coffee all over yourself," said Mann, 24. : Taking part in Triple M 105.5 FM's "Project M" this spring forced her to write quickly, even when she felt like putting a song aside for a while. The local radio station's "American Idol"-like contest pitted 10 local singer-songwriters against each other. Each week the musicians participated in challenges, like writing a song around an assigned title or from the viewpoint of the opposite gender. : The weekly deadlines took her back to cramming in college. : "Writing a new song every week was daunting," she said. "It was tough to put creativity behind an idea that I felt comfortable enough playing to people." : But that kind of pressure unblocks musical ideas, too. The Triple M contest was "a good laxative" for songwriting, joked Kyle Jacobson, Mann's boyfriend and bass player. : She used to call her band "Whitney Mann and the Boys," but she decided to drop "the Boys" because it "just seemed kind of honky tonk and ridiculous." : This May, she and her band self-released their first album, "The Way Back Home," a six-song EP of wistful and sad Americana originals ("the more heartbreaking it is, the better the song," she said). They strived for a "live" sound, reminiscent of Alison Krauss and Robert Plant's "Raising Sand," using no overdubs except for Andrew Harrison's pedal steel and some vocals. : They recorded it over the course of just one weekend at a studio in Milwaukee. By midnight that Saturday, drummer Tim Russell had passed out from fatigue, but Jacobson and Mann stayed up to dub a "choir" part. A self-described "cheapskate," she was determined to save money by finishing the recording over one weekend: "Compared to other people, we did (the recording) really cheap." : Jacobson, 26, and Mann met while working together as photojournalists for a television station in Rockford, Ill. He grew up skateboarding and listening to Fugazi and "didn't listen to any female singer-songwriters" until he met her. Now, he's not only playing in her backing band, but promoting her as well. He submitted the video that garnered her the spot in the Triple M contest, and he attended each of the weekly Project M sessions. : "He came every week to eat the free food and drink Old Style," said Mann. : She ended up not winning Project M, but it doesn't seem to bother her very much. Many of the other contestants were students or full-time musicians, she said, and had more time to invest in the weekly songwriting challenges than Mann, who works full time for a creative software company. : Now, she's back to writing songs at her own pace. : "Half of my songs I wrote in the shower," she said. Recently, she broke from her sad song tradition to write a silly song with the line, "Grandpappy was a milkman." She got the idea for it from an old potholder from the '50s or '60s that marketed a milkman named Carl Mann, coincidentally her grandfather's name. : It took her 38 minutes to write the song -- the songwriting equivalent of a tall glass of icy soda on a hot day.

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