Since 2007, I’ve written somewhere around 1,600 songs — averaging about one or two a week, year after year. For a long time that meant one thing: a binder. Lyrics, chord charts, half-finished melodies, all of it finally fully catalogued and printed for myself so I could actually see the scope of what I’d built.

Most of those songs have never been recorded. They exist as words on a page and a memory of a melody — some of them clear as day, some of them nearly gone.

I’m changing that. I’m recording a demo of every single one.

The Why

Not every song in 1,600 is a keeper — that’s just the honest math of writing that much for that long. But some of them are genuinely good, and all of them deserve to exist as more than ink on paper. The plan is to build a working demo library — a single, growing SoundCloud playlist — so an artist looking for a song, or a writer to work with, has somewhere real to look instead of nothing at all.

The Process

Each demo is a chance to test something new: a different DAW, a new plugin, a virtual instrument I haven’t used yet. Some songs get the full Cubase-with-Waves-plugins treatment; others are quick sketches. For the songs I wrote years ago and don’t fully remember — the melody’s gone fuzzy, the arrangement’s a question mark — I’ve started experimenting with AI-generated backing tracks as a way to reconstruct a foundation I can sing over and rebuild from.

It’s slow, deliberate work. But it’s also the best kind of practice: every song is a different problem to solve with different tools, which means every demo teaches me something the last one didn’t.

What Happens to the Rest

My goal is to record as many of the 1,600 as I possibly can. But realistically, some won’t make it to a demo — whether the melody’s too far gone or the time just doesn’t stretch that far. For those, I’m posting the lyrics on my website, so even the songs that never get a recording still have a home somewhere and aren’t lost for good.

Where Things Stand

I’m 40 songs in, with roughly 1,560 to go. This isn’t a sprint — it’s a long-haul project running alongside new writing, which never stops. The rule that’s carried me through nearly two decades of this still applies: three hours a day, no matter what.

Follow the playlist as it grows, and if you’re an artist or writer looking for material, feel free to reach out — that’s exactly what this library is for.

— Matthew Haubert, Fracture & Form

Click here for the demos that I have done recording so far