Donald Trump may be a nightmare for fans of logic, justice and the English language. But he’s a godsend for any writer out to capture a character you can’t ignore.

Small wonder so many songwriters signed on to 30 Days, 30 Songs, a kind of sonic pop-up project that has been delivering a new message of protest every 24 hours for the entire month leading up to the election. Each piece means to offer a different view of the mother of all reality show stunts: the Trump campaign.

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Nine have been released so far, together swirling a cocktail of wit, vitriol and apoplexy. Not every participant in this project wrote a song to order. Josh Ritter’s The Temptation of Adam first turned up on an album nearly a decade ago, while Jim James’s Same Old Lies already served as the first single off his forthcoming solo album. For yesterday’s release, REM retro-fitted a song from nearly 20 years ago. It’s a live version of World Leader Pretend, a song whose megalomaniacal, wall-building narrator originally served as a metaphor for a self-involved lover. Subbing in Trump proves not that big a leap.

Ritter’s piece fully deserves its fresh airing given lyrics that could reflect an imagined worst-case-scenario of a Trump presidency. It’s a love song set in a world on the brink of nuclear war. With the blackest of humor, the lyrics conflate paranoia, nihilism and lust, a troika ideally suited to the Trump gestalt. It helps that Adam features one of Ritter’s best-formed folk-rock melodies, with a beauty reminiscent of Paul Simon’s most fluid tunes.

James’s piece has less lyrical specificity but nearly as much sonic allure. It’s a broadside aimed at commonly believed falsehoods, something that could apply to Trump or to any number of other sinister forces. Luckily, the psych-pop music has an hallucinogenic pull, expressing a balance of confusion and outrage.

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The first song wholly initiated by the 30 Days project came from Death Cab For Cutie. Band leader Ben Gibbard seized on an anecdote from the first presidential debate in which the Donald claimed he started his business empire with a million dollar loan from his father. It’s a spoof on both privilege and elastic truth, sung with maximum sarcasm and wariness.

The American singer-songwriter Bhi Bhiman zeroed in on Trump’s apparent one-way bromance with Vladimir Putin. Using the James Bond-inspired title With Love, From Russia, the song imagines a deal between the two politicians which has Putin taking the Baltic countries while giving Trump in return fantasy properties from Monopoly. An accompanying video surveys a painting of Trump and Putin lost in a deep kiss, as the music lurches through a flatulent synth-pop beat.

El Vy – a project between the National’s Matt Berninger and Ramona Falls’ Brent Knopf – takes an equally cartoonish approach. The visuals for Are These My Jets center on a video game character named Richard Walrus, who flies a tiny plane that blows things to hell while a weeping Abraham Lincoln looks on. The lyrics aren’t as coherent, but at least they beat the clunk of Before You Vote, a last-ditch entreaty to Trump supporters by Thao Nguyen (of Thao & the Get Down Stay Down). “He doesn’t care about you,” she yelps. “He just wants his terrible reality show back on NBC.”

Far more insightful humor can be found in Aimee Mann’s contribution. Her sprightly folk-pop song Can’t You Tell aims to get inside Trump’s head, treating his candidacy as a joke he started that got out of control. “Isn’t anybody going to stop me?” she has Trump poignantly ask. “I don’t want this job/I can’t do this job/My God/ can’t you tell?/I’m unwell.”

Mann’s song may have the best lines, and the catchiest melody, but a special award for speed should go to Franz Ferdinand for Demagogue. Just two weeks after the Access Hollywood revelation, the band managed to jam in an allusion to Trump’s famous “p”-word outburst. The music has a Bowie-in-Berlin sturm und drang, while the video boasts artwork from Shepard Fairey. Not since Neil Young dashed off Ohio mere weeks after the Kent State shootings has a band reacted this quickly to a public event. Of course, Demagogue hasn’t anywhere near the potency of Ohio. In fact, none of the snarky pieces in the project so far have the enraged genius of a song like, say, Elvis Costello’s take-down of Margaret Thatcher, Tramp the Dirt Down. But in an election cycle that seems hellishly endless, these quick pricks and swipes are providing some sweet relief.