Austin jam-pop phenom Bob Schneider doesn't take songwriting lightly, but that's not to say that he hasn't made a game of it. Schneider and a select group of friends -- including Jason Mraz -- have even turned composing into a competitive sport of sorts. Here's how the contest works: one of the songwriters picks an abstract word or phrase and then they each set about penning a song that uses it somehow. The results can be creative, to say the least, which is exactly the point. In fact, it's given Schneider enough usable material that many of the songs on his newest release, 'Lovely Creatures,' came from playing the game.

Fellow contestant Billy Harvey once played the game with Schneider using the phrase "bicycle versus car," and now a song of the same name appears on 'Lovely Creatures' as the album closer. "When it came time for us to play the songs for each other," Schneider tells Spinner, "I realized after I played him mine, while we were listening to his, that he hadn't used the phrase at all in his song."

Looks like we know who won that round. Schneider explains that, while the game word or phrase is, of course, supposed to actually make it into the song, it doesn't need to be a focal point. He points to another song from the new album, 'Realness of Space,' as an example. "The phrase was 'I want my house back,' which you hear in the first chorus, but it really has very little to do with the song," he says. "Well, I'm not so sure about that, because I'm not really sure what this song is about, kind of like I'm not really sure what life is about as well. I have some ideas, of course, but no real conclusions."

Well, Bob, maybe you should write a song about that.