Tweets So Sweet They Had To Sing

Posted by Noah J Nelson on April 11, 2011

Kevyn Smith and Jeremy Johnson started a musical social media experiment last year: they would pick Tweets from other people’s Twitter feeds and turn them into songs.

Since We Sing Your Tweets (@wesingyourtweet) began the two have “sweeted” (a mash-up of “song” and “tweet”) hundreds of quips and quotes from Twitter users from all walks of life. We caught up to the duo using good old fashioned e-mail.

TURNSTYLE: You’ve been composing “sweets” for over seven months now, did either of you have any notion you’d go for this long when you started the experiment?

Kind of, yes. We didn’t know if the people out there would like or want this thing we were doing, so we figured we would do it until it got tired. But then people really responded to having their tweets sweeted. It’s still fun for us, so we’ll keep doing it until it’s not fun.

What’s the difference for the two of you between adapting tweets into songs and creating original lyrics from scratch?

Sweets are a much quicker process than writing original songs. We select tweets based on their melodic possibilities, or their topicality or whatever – we see what jumps out at us and go with it. So those sweet lyrics are done and can’t be changed.  If the tweet somehow doesn’t flow well or translate to song, we may just scrap it and move on to another one. Writing songs, you need to commit a little more to a narrative and melody than we do when we send out these little musical hors d’oeuvres.

How much time a week goes into making “sweets”?

2 or 3 nights a week – we were recording 20 sweets a night, then posting all of them the next day, a big flood of little songs. We’re now trying to post just a few every day.

What have been some of you favorites so far?

Jonah Hill just joined Twitter a month or so ago, and we sweeted him right away – it was a great appeal to make the most of a Thursday night, I think. And we did the top ten retweeted sweets of the year as a project for NPR, which was fun, and the State of the Union Sweets came out really well. And the Halloween Sweets, and the Christmas Sweets – too many to choose a favorite, I guess.

What kind of impact does the experiment have on the time you’ve got for your band projects?

Our acoustic duo (Dave Hates Chico) used to play a lot of open mikes before we took on the sweets. And now we have a drummer and can fully take it electric, which we prefer. But we will be choosing a new band name soon.

You’re hitting LA this week, what’s on the agenda?

We hope for a lot of hot tub parties.

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