The Public Song Project began as a listener engagement experiment on a WNYC radio show — three years on, it has grown into something considerably more expansive: concerts at Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Public Library, a free album featuring Rosanne Cash and They Might Be Giants, and a new partnership with the Internet Archive. The premise is simple: find something in the public domain, and make a song from it. We put some questions to its creator, Simon Close, to find out more.

How did the Public Song Project start, and how has it evolved since its first year?

This started in 2023 on the radio show I produce, All Of It with Alison Stewart on WNYC. We cover music but kept running into licensing questions when playing music on the air. We decided to make a listener engagement project focused on the public domain. We’ve gotten hundreds of submissions, hosted concerts at major New York arts institutions, teamed up with libraries, and this year partnered with the Internet Archive to create a playlist of all our entries.

What kinds of public domain material do participants tend to draw on most — visual art, text, early recordings? And how do they typically navigate that translation?

Song covers are definitely the most popular submission type — some are faithful recreations, but others are pretty radical interpretations. We get some mashups. We also get many poems set to original music. Sometimes we’ll even get multiple interpretations of the same poem, and I love to hear how different people interpret the feeling of text musically. Some people draw from novels and may take a section of text and set that, or they may take the story and write their own song based on it. I’d be eager to hear more songs that sample audio from music and film. I’d also love to see more submissions that incorporate visual art.

Could you walk us through how the creation of a submission might unfold — from source material through to the finished song?

1 — Find something in the public domain. We have resources on our website for digging through the public domain and understanding copyright terms — and of course the Public Domain Review is a great resource as well. One thing I’ll say: I guarantee you’re already familiar with something in the public domain that would make a great song.

2 — Draw something out of that source material. This is the creative part, so there’s only so much guidance I can give. You can cover a song, or you can pull out a piece of it — a melody, lyrics, a whole story or fragments. Trust your gut — if it feels expressive or inventive, you’re on the right track.

3 — Record it. If you have special recording equipment or production software that’s great, but it isn’t essential. We’ve had winners who just recorded their song in a single take, even with their phone’s basic recording app.

What’s surprised you most about the submissions you’ve received?

I didn’t quite anticipate how this project would become a way for people to share their personal stories. We had one submission — solo, just this woman’s voice — of a song the submitter explained was one her mother used to sing on long car trips. This submitter was now much older, her mother had passed away, but she still sang the song, and she sent it to us in honour of her on Mothers’ Day. This art can really be used to help us tell stories and emphasise connection.

How does the judging panel approach evaluation? What makes a submission stand out?

Creativity is a broad word but it is what we’re rewarding. How did you choose this original piece of art, and what did you do with it? You can be rewarded for transformation — changing the work in a radically original way — and you also can be rewarded for the reason behind an adaptation. If your song tells a personal story, or if you’re engaging with the history and context of the original piece, that will make the entry more powerful.

The project has involved artists like They Might Be Giants and Rosanne Cash — are there noticeable differences in how professional musicians approach public domain material?

I got to make a special album with all these artists I admire for WNYC’s centennial — and it’s free to stream on Bandcamp. Rhiannon Giddens paid tribute to the groundbreaking singer Florence Mills and her trademark song. Will Butler made a ghostly cover of a Gershwin song his own grandmother used to sing. But in short: there’s really not much separating pros from anyone else. Since that album was mostly straight covers, members of the public have the opportunity to one-up some Grammy winners.

Could you tell us a little bit more about how the partnership with the Internet Archive came about, and what you hope it will bring to the project?

I’d had some contact with the Internet Archive last year for their Public Domain Day celebration. I reached back out to them ahead of this year's project to see if they’d be interested in a more formal partnership, and it was immediately a perfect fit. They’re already important advocates for the public domain, and for free access to art and information in general. They’re also a research library, which is great for two reasons: they have resources for anyone trying to search through the public domain, and they have the infrastructure to host our playlist of submissions. Not to mention their archive receives over a million visitors each day! Working with them means the project has homebases on both US coasts, along with a whole new audience. I hope it expands the kinds of songs and stories we’re able to include. I also hope it exposes more people to the Internet Archive's web advocacy and preservation work, which they'll have been doing for exactly 30 years as of May 10! (Which happens to be our deadline)

What do you hope participants and listeners take away from the experience?

I can imagine someone walking away thinking about all kinds of things — what did I learn about history from digging through this older art? What does it mean to own art? How do copyright laws, which have grown increasingly lengthy over time, help or hurt the ability to be creative? And then there are more personal questions: what did I learn about my own creative process? I hope that in most cases submitters come away with a newfound feeling of connection — to history, community, or their own creative ability. At the very least, you will walk away having created something, and that’s a wonderful thing.

If you were a participant yourself, what public domain work would you choose?

One of my favourite poems is “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. It’s a sonnet that feels kind of like a ballad — a clear narrative and a chilling payoff. I bet it would be an interesting experiment to adapt it as a story-song in the folk or country tradition.