Can Coffee Inspire You?

Story Behind The Song Maybe Coffee Can Inspire Me

As I said in my introductory post, I would like to share all kinds of musical musings with you. As you can imagine, my songwriting journey is a big part of that. Therefore I would like to share some stories behind the songs with you from time to time. Since on September 20th, 2024, I released a new song called Maybe Coffee Can Inspire Me for my subscribers in the Garden of Creation on Bandcamp, this seems like the perfect time. But before I tell you more about the song, I need to give you a little background on my latest releases, my albums Cats & Coffee Cups and In Moments Like These as well as the Garden of Creation. For this reason, this is a rather long post and I do hope it's not too confusing. The thing is, I'm going to be talking about two of my albums, my new single, and my subscription service - and it's almost impossible to talk about one without the other, as they're so closely related. So, why not grab a nice cup of coffee or cappuccino and enjoy this? Tea or any other beverage is great, too – but as the song title suggests coffee plays a pretty important role.

In June this year (2024) I released my 2nd full-length album called Cats & Coffee Cups. It's an all-acoustic album, just guitar and voice. The main purpose of all these songs was to spread comfort in difficult times - that was the aim of the songs I wrote in 2022 when I was desperate for comfort myself when it seemed there was too much going wrong in the world. I also thought that many people could relate to that feeling and could also use a dose of hope, comfort and faith.

And why are they all acoustic? While I love finding arrangements for my songs, this album was written for my subscription service on Bandcamp, which I call Garden of Creation. Yes - we neurodivergent folks just LOVE fancy names! The idea behind the Garden of Creation was to create a place where I could share my songwriting journey with subscribers. It works a lot like Patreon – only in my case it's on Bandcamp.

I believe that every idea is like a seed that, with proper care, can grow into a beautiful song, just as a seed can grow into a flower. Over time, the Garden of Creation will hopefully bloom with a wide variety of flowers. Subscribers can get early access to the songs I'm writing, some of which will be released exclusively as acoustic or unplugged versions. While most of the songs will be new, I may introduce some older unreleased songs. You'll be able to follow the journey of the songs and see how they grow, just like flowers.

Anyway, when I launched the Garden of Creation in 2022, I thought - hm, I promised the subscribers new songs, so I better write some! That thought alone gave me quite a creative boost and I wrote many, many songs in a very short time. But instead of releasing single after single after single, I wanted to release these songs as an album. And since I had said that the new songs would be acoustic or unplugged, the album would be acoustic, too.

The album title came to me rather spontaneously, as there are a lot of cats and coffee in these songs. There are other comforting things on this record that didn't make it into the title, like wine, books, flowers and records. But I thought if I had to choose, I'd go with cats and coffee. In Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree, one of my favourite books, the taste of coffee is described as peace. I hope that's what you'll find when you listen to this album.

Anyway – the album was finished in May 2024, after two years of recording. Brady Jo mixed and mastered song by song and gave me valuable advice throughout the recording process. Looking back, I can’t believe it took so long, even though the songs are all acoustic. But both Brady and I like to work slowly but thoroughly. As a result, the album is now much better than if we had rushed it.

You can listen to it here:

Also in May 2024, I wrote four more songs that would have been perfect for the Cats & Coffee Cups album. Well, two songs are about cats and two songs are about coffee. But the album was finished and about to be released. There was no way to record those songs in time to include them on the album. Well, I recorded them anyway and have released them with Garden of Creation subscribers before they were released. The songs are now part of the Cats & Coffee Cups Bonus Songs album and the Cats & Coffee Cups Expanded Edition both exclusively available on Bandcamp at the moment.

As I said earlier, the song I would like to talk about is called Maybe Coffee Can Inspire Me. And here’s the story behind it.

In this song I am exploring how coffee can break writer's block, something every writer experiences more often than they'd like. Coffee can do both - it gives you the necessary kick and at the same time a quiet coffee break gives you peace and reduces the anxiety that comes from the block. It just lets you take a moment to breathe. So, coffee is actually liquid peace that opens the mind when it's blocked. But there's another story behind the song that involves my demo album In Moments Like These.

In 2023 I took part in the Album Writing Club of the Lights & Lines label ( https://lightsandlines.bandcamp.com ). The challenge was to write and record an album in the month of May. I met the challenge and wrote 10 songs in the first half of May and recorded them as demos in my little homestudio - if that's what you want to call my humble space with my computer that is connected to an audio interface.

However, for some time I was unable to come up with a title for the album. All the songs were written and the recordings were in progress - but the album title was missing. As a rule, I never choose a song title as the album title but I prefer using either a line from a song on the album or I combine lines or words from several songs. And I just couldn't find one that worked! One day I was chatting to label boss and initiator of the Album Writing Club, Mike Five, on Twitter when I was still there. I jokingly said that I was struggling to come up with an album title, but that maybe coffee could inspire me. Mike then suggested Maybe Coffee Can Inspire Me as the album title. We laughed about it, and I agree that it would be a good album title, but it didn't really fit. In case you were wondering, just before I submitted the album, I had a flash of inspiration while I was on one of my walks. I was listening to my rough demo recordings once more before submitting the album when the title came to me like a bolt of lightning. It couldn't be any other, it was THE title and after many sleepless nights and countless tentative titles that were kind of okay, I remember thinking "THIS!!! This is it!" and In Moments Like These it was. You can listen to it here:

Anyway, ever since I had that conversation with Mike, I wanted to write at least a song called Maybe Coffee Can Inspire Me! Looks like that chat did inspire me!

So if you love coffee as much as I do, I think you will love this song! It was released on September 20th in the Garden of Creation as a subscriber-exclusive song. But it will also be released to everyone on Bandcamp - in fact, there will be two special releases there on the 18th and 25th of October. And if you want to find out more about the Garden of Creation, this page has all the details:

annikajayne.bandcamp.com/garden-of-creation

If you have made it this far, thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed the post and your coffee (or tea). May it inspire you!