Imagine joining a secret band where no one is allowed to know who else is in the band. Imagine only having seven days to write and record tracks for an album that no one is allowed to talk about. Imagine finding out that your bandmates are from all over the world. Welcome to The Man Who Was Thursday Project.

Using online classifieds site Craigslist, artist John Herman attracted twenty-five musicians from around the world to collaborate secretly in a band called The Man Who Was Thursday.

With the help of Joseph K. Murphy of Murkadee, John created written challenges to send to his band members. Musicians reported back from cities as far flung as London, Paris, New York, and Seattle. Each challenge was uniquely designed --drumbeats set to a musician's heart rate, lyrics inspired by dreams, translations back and forth from Italian to English to Spanish, drawings, poems, historic research, physical sensation, emotion, and memory. Finally the songs were engineered by Joseph K. Murphy and Jon Briggs.

According to Herman, part of the thrill of the project was its secretive nature. No one knew what the music was for. No one knew who was in the band. The project title, The Man Who Was Thursday, came from the 1907 novel of the same name by G.K. Chesterton. The book's plot involves a secret society of anarchists who title themselves after days of the week. Herman explains that most of the band members in his project will never meet, but the artists are forever linked by an album born from their own creativity and a unique connection provided by the Internet.

Here is a great post by band member Ernesto Burden. He describes the project from his perspective on the day of the unveiling.