LW - Making a Secular Solstice Songbook by jefftk

Link to original article

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Making a Secular Solstice Songbook, published by jefftk on January 24, 2024 on LessWrong.
After this year's secular solstice several people were saying they'd be interested in getting together to sing some of these songs casually. This is a big part of what we sang at the post-EAG music party, but one issue was logistical: how do you get everyone on the same words and chords?
I have slides (2023, 2022, 2019, 2018) with the chords and lyrics to the songs we've done at the past few events, but they have some issues:
They were intended only for my use, so they're a bit hard to make sense of.
The text is too small for phones.
They horizontally oriented, when for a phone you want something vertical.
There's no index.
Google docs is slow on phones.
Another option is Daniel Speyer's list from his secular solstice resources, but this includes a lot of songs we've never done in Boston and doesn't have the chords easily accessible.
Instead I put together a web page: jefftk.com/solsong. It's intentionally one long page, trying to mimic the experience of a paper songbook where you can flip through looking for interesting things. [1] I went through the sides copying lyrics over, and then added a few other songs I like from earlier years.
I've planned a singing party for Saturday 2024-02-17, 7pm at our house (fb). Let me know if you'd like to come!
[1] At a technical level the page is just HTML, as is my authoring preference. Since line breaks aren't significant in HTML but are in lyrics, I used a little command line trick in copying them over:
To include an index without needing to duplicate titles I have a little progressive-enhancement JS:
Comment via: facebook, mastodon
Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org