The Beginning....

Who knows what I was doing on Twitter at that moment. (Who knows what anyone is doing on Twitter.) As I sometimes do, I provided a cheeky answer to a fairly straightforward question:

I know, kind of juvenile. But what the heck, it seemed funny enough, it got a few likes and retweets, and I forgot all about it.

Until the fateful phone call.

I got a call from the Planet Money team.Turns out, they wanted to use my question in their podcast, and would I mind being interviewed? Being a big NPR geek, of course I was willing. We had a nice chat, which ended up in the Jan 27. 2016 episode of the podcast. (They play a little of it at the beginning, then the main part of the interview at 15:30).

Cliff notes version: Robert Smith offered to send me $20, which I will pay back in a year with interest. After agreeing to a $20 loan (at a whopping 10% interest rate!) I started really thinking about what I could do with the money that would be somehow helpful/meaningful. Since I was going to have to pay it back, I wanted to invest in my music business. Of course, $20 does not go a long way these days.

A few of the rejected ideas:
a new capo
two sets of strings
a book of songs
an album of archival recordings
a lot of cheap picks
half of an expensive pick
a pizza

The winning idea? A new notebook and pen, which I will use to write a handful of children's songs about money/economics. I will then record the songs, post them on bandcamp, and hopefully make at least $22 in downloads so I can pay back my loan!

I'll be chronicling this process on this blog; posting pictures of the notebook I select, audio of song demos, lyrics etc.

If you have any suggestions for song topics, feel free to send them my way! I feel safe saying that I do NOT know much about economics, so hopefully I'll learn a bit along the way as well.

See you on twitter!  (you never know what might happen!)