I never set out to be a songwriter.
Back when I was studying violin at the New England Conservatory and the Conservatory at Rivers, I thought I’d be playing classical music forever — maybe in an orchestra, maybe teaching at a conservatory somewhere. I traveled Europe with the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra and played principal viola in the Five College Symphony. At that point in my life, music meant technique, discipline, rehearsal, and repertoire. I hadn’t yet realized that I had something of my own to say.
When I landed at Hampshire College, things started to shift. I was studying Ethnomusicology, Composition, Jazz, Theory, Electronic Music — the whole gamut. Hampshire gave me space to explore. I was surrounded by other musicians who were pushing boundaries. Up the street at Amherst College, I took a class with David Reck called The Music of E.E. Cummings. It was more than a composition course — it was a revelation. He encouraged us to be honest, expressive, weird. That’s when I started composing. That’s when music stopped being something I performed and started being something I created.
I still remember my first full composition: Death of the Serious Musician. We recorded it at Buckley Recital Hall at Amherst, and I mixed it in the Electronic Music studio at Hampshire. After that, I wrote Frog Pond Stomp with Steve Schreiber and J. Phillip Argyris, a piano concerto called For Kawai, and a synth series based on Dylan’s This Wheel’s On Fire. All of that work was saved on reel-to-reel tapes, which have long since disappeared. But the process of composing — of building something from silence — stuck with me.
Still, life took over. I formed bands, got married, worked day jobs. I taught hundreds of private students. I played fiddle in Pieces of Neck and the Lonesome Fish Quintet, opened for Vassar Clements and Jonathan Edwards at the Rusty Nail in Hadley. I played Klezmer, contradance, and Irish music throughout New England. For a while, I was writing music here and there, but mostly I was teaching it or playing it live. That was enough.
Then COVID hit, and everything changed.
My in-person teaching studio was wiped out almost overnight. Most of my students at the time were older — in their 60s, 70s, even 80s — and understandably didn’t want to risk group classes or private lessons. I scrambled to move everything online. I recorded over 150 “how to” videos and posted them to YouTube. I figured if people saw how I taught, they’d sign up for lessons.
Nobody did.
Instead, they watched the videos and taught themselves. It’s hard to compete with “free.” YouTube has over 1,100 subscribers to my channel, and not a single one of them ever registered for a lesson. My ads didn’t perform either. Once AI took over the social media algorithms, self-promotion posts vanished into the noise. The only way to get seen now is to pay — and I’m not in a position to throw money at ads.
In 2024, I took a part-time job with a construction company in Easthampton. It was in one of the old mills. I was supposed to be their administrative assistant, but they didn’t have a real role for me. No desk, no phone, no job description. I fetched the mail, logged a few receipts, and tried to make myself useful. After six months, they let me go.
That was just before my wife and son left on their epic trip to South Korea, China, and Japan. The original plan was for me to stay home and work part-time while caring for the farm. Well, best-laid plans and all that. Instead of working, I found myself staring down a summer with no income, barely any students, and nothing but time.
So I turned back to composing.
I realized I’d been writing music my whole life — just in the margins. In the past few years, that shifted. Now it’s the center of my creative life. I started digitizing my old compositions and uploading them to Bandcamp. Then I started writing new ones — based on news articles, conversations, moments from my life, things I see happening around me.
I wrote a song about the floods in Vermont. I wrote one about a New Hampshire law that ended car inspections — a bluegrass tune called No More Stickers. A legislator picked it up and shared it on his website. I made over $100 in one day just from people buying that one song. It was the most I’d earned in music since before COVID.
Since then, I’ve written dozens of songs and released full albums:
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The Pioneer Valley and The Seven Sisters — songs about the towns and people of western Massachusetts
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Clam Or Bisque? — a collection of stories and songs from growing up in New England
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Sweet Songs Laboratory — a double album of electronic and dance music
Some songs take years to finish. Others come out fast. It all starts with a phrase or idea. I jot it down in a notebook or a Google Doc. I sit at my desk with my thesaurus, sketch out lyrics, then move to the guitar or mandolin to find the rhythm and melody. I use a simple recording setup: a Shure SM50 mic and Audacity. Once the vocal and rhythm track are down, I send the project to trusted collaborators — guitarists, vocalists, harpists, whoever the tune calls for. I record my own fiddle and mandolin parts. Then I mix and send it out for mastering. Once I have a final version, I post it on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, YouTube, Rumble — wherever people might find it.
I also started writing electronic music. I picked up a used modular synth rig on eBay — reminds me of the old ARP 2500 from my school days — and began experimenting. That work turned into Sweet Songs Laboratory, which includes tracks like Quantum Euphoria, Ancient Ocean Kings, and Supernova Twice. I’m not a dancer, but I’ve always loved the structure and energy of electronic music. It’s another way to explore what’s possible.
My process has evolved, but the reason I write music hasn’t. I write because it’s the one thing I’ve never stopped doing — no matter where life has taken me. Whether I was working at Bread & Circus, touring with a bluegrass band, raising kids, or losing my job during a pandemic, music has always been there. Not just to comfort, but to make sense of things.
These days, I may be "retired" in the eyes of the economy, but I’m still working. I just do it at home now, with a mug of coffee, a guitar in my hands, and my farm outside the window. I may not know what comes next, but I know I’ll keep writing.
If you’d like to hear what I’ve been working on, check out my Bandcamp: https://adamsweet.bandcamp.com. I’ll keep posting updates and behind-the-scenes stories here on the blog as each new song goes live.
Thanks for listening.
—Adam