Last March, we enjoyed bringing you Thirty-One Days of Music, featuring a different free music podcast each day.

This March, blogger–podcaster–songwriter Dean Whitbread (aka @DeekDeekster) has been taking a different approach to a music-filled month of March. Five mornings a week, he and a group of spectator/collaborators have been writing a fresh song daily on Rise and Shine TV.

Says Dean, “We wake up very early, we read the news, and we decide which story is going to inspire us to write a song that morning, and we write and record a song in three hours’ time.”

The live streaming of the songwriting begins at 7am GMT (yawn! 2am here in Iowa, USA). Three hours later, the finished song is performed, and available for download shortly after as a free podcast. A high-fidelity mp3 of the song is available, for purchase, later in the day.

Proceeds from this one-month pilot project go to South African music nonprofit buskaid, which provides instruments and a classical music education for underprivileged kids based in South Africa. Rise and Shine hopes to raise $500US by the end of the trial (which finishes this weekend).

“It’s a collaborative effort, since the audience are also giving ideas, feedback, even lyrical and musical accompaniment sometimes. The audience is very much part of the process, so it’s kind of like a reality show, but the songwriters are responding to the audience and also responding to the headlines of the day,”Whitbread says.

Song topics and musical styles have ranged widely, from spooky tales of dismembered feet, to acoustic songs about Leap Day, techno songs about water on the moon, and even a song about hamster ownership in Vietnam.

Whitbread calls it “a crazy idea,” a combination of download-on-demand and live, combining his background of podcasting post-production work, with live content creation and performance. “In last ten minutes of the process, we’re ready to record the song, and we don’t always have the melody down. It’s crazy but it always works.”

There are already some murmurs of this pilot songwriting/live interactive/downloadable content format being made into an ongoing series, which would be great.

In the meantime, Dean shared a little mp3 about the Rise and Shine “model” and how it has worked. If you’re up early (or very late, if you’re in the US), check out the last live show in this pilot today. It’s exciting to look in on, and sometimes be privileged to take part in, the creative process.