The premise is gloriously simple: find something in the public domain, make a song from it. What began in 2023 as a listener-engagement experiment on WNYC’s All Of It has grown into concerts at Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Public Library, a free centennial album with Rosanne Cash, Rhiannon Giddens, Will Butler, and They Might Be Giants, and a partnership with the Internet Archive.
The process is a three-step invitation:
- Find something in the public domain — a song to cover, a poem, a fragment of a novel
- Draw something out of it — a melody, lyrics, a story, or just a feeling
- Record it — winners have submitted single takes on a phone’s basic recording app
Submissions skew toward song covers and poems set to original music, often with several different musical readings of the same poem. The most striking entries carry personal weight: one woman recorded a song her late mother used to sing on long car trips, sent in on Mother’s Day.
Two threads make the project more than a radio stunt:
- A working critique of copyright — the whole endeavor depends on a public domain that terms “grown increasingly lengthy over time” keep shrinking
- Real commons infrastructure — the Internet Archive (thirty years into its preservation work) hosts the playlist and lends the project its research-library backbone
Creator Simon Close notes that professionals approach the material much like amateurs do — “there’s really not much separating pros from anyone else.” His own hypothetical entry: Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” adapted as a folk or country story-song.
A good reminder that the public domain is not a legal abstraction. It is a shared shelf of raw material — and it is waiting to be sung.