Write Club Composes Typewritten Letters Of Love And Hate

• PixieHammer
• The machine of love

In this week’s paper, Leor Galil has a sweet and funny story about Downwrite, a custom songwriting service cofounded by Bob Nanna of Braid. For a few hundred bucks, Nanna and his colleagues will write and perform an original song about anything you want, even how your beloved appreciates your cats, as loud and fast (or soft and slow) as you want. If music is indeed the food of love, Downwrite will be making many, many people happy this week.

“We talked back and forth and came up with love letters,” Belknap says. “But love was deemed insufficient, so we offered love and hate.” They decided the letters should be typed because Muscato has been collecting typewriters for the past eight years and was excited to finally be able to have a use for them.

Nonetheless, the letters they’ve written so far have encompassed the full spectrum of love, from its first bloom to its final bitter death. Extreme emotions, though, tend to be expressed more generically, Belknap observes. He and Muscato have found that the most interesting letters—and stories—come from the middle range.