I feel a little weird doing this but it worked last time. The current project is nowhere near as far along as Sand was when I started keeping a log last year, but it is much less ambitious. Furthermore as the days get shorter I think maybe I need to keep myself motivated to actually get out of my apartment and work. This might help.
I am not working as much as I used to, which means I do not have as much income as I am used to having, but also means I have more time than I expected. The main reason to prioritize finishing another album is to fill the time with something productive that makes me happy. I do not have a large audience and I prefer to make my music available for free, I do not expect to be able to live off of album income but I just did a short run of floppy disks and more people than I expected paid for it. (There are still a few left.)
But also I have not been thinking a lot about music lately. I'm sort of playing parts for a couple friends every now and again but I am not in a productive rhythm. I started working on the next album in earnest a few months after Sand came out, and when my recording space got hit by floods at the same time my job came back, I sort of lost momentum. So where are we? Let's take stock.
There are two songs from the next thing, Millennials Are Killing and Once A Day that have already been released. They will probably only receive minimum updates for an album release. I have one song "Brands" that is mostly recorded but I am not totally happy with the way it sounds. I wanted it to be a sort of acoustic four on the floor dancey thing but I am wondering if it needs to be much more synthy? I like the idea of phasery accordion as a pad but it is not as good in practice. I played lots of live percussion too but I am wondering if it would be better pared down. I also think I want to get my hands on a piano for the solo too, my friend's piano has recently been repaired so I should hit her up.
There is another song Gray Water that has, at the very least, a percussion bed. There is slap bass throughout the whole thing and I am not very good at that, I have 183 takes of it that I recorded in the summer but through an amp, while editing it now I realized I want it DI. I arranged it for lots of horns when I made a midi to back myself up with for the one show I did, it will most likely wind up more woodwindy and gang vocaly. I did a version of this in 2018 while recording Can't Turn It Off; at the time some friends were working on a themed music project that this song fit with and I offered it to them and they said it was too funky. Imagine that! Me, funky!
For Can't Turn It Off, I was conscious about the flow (especially harmonically) from song to song, but did not really go out of my way to do anything special. Sand came together over roughly a decade and I was always changing keys, writing codas, doing crossfades or smash cuts to make the album feel more cohesive. I'm in a weird spot with this project because half the songs have already been written and recorded and the other half have just barely started to coalesce over the past six months, I think I wrote a transition for a song that already does not have one?
The new song of that couplet, Brother, had kind of this pianoy Beatles feel but this album is not very much like that so it then developed this kind of madcap Wendy Carlos arpeggio feel, Eastern European 3/4 synth nightmare, pounding incessantly on bass drums. There are two instrumentals but I realized I am basically playing the same one twice. I started with some more theatrical vocals (kinda The Next Colonel Sanders) but couldn't pull it off and did normal vocals and it's fine. Already it seems like this album has a very spring reverby feel, like I am trapped in the vents screaming. Dead Man's Coat would've fit on this record.
It is much more Can't Turn It Off than Sand at this point, a little more rough and agressive and anxious. We'll see how much that changes I guess. Some songs are only half written even still. The last time I wrote was like three months ago, I gotta figure out how to get into that headspace again. Some songs I already wrote or reocrded are likely to be cut. It's weird to be here again, in the position I was in like three years ago with Can't Turn It Off, where everything is kind of up in the air.
What else can I say. I've thought many times about renting a marimba or (full-size) xylophone, I don't know how or if that will happen. Also this project is probably called Same, but I do not like that name very much anymore, at least not as much as I did when it began in like 2017. But I do have stuff set for a cover shoot already, which was a big sticking point for Sand, so maybe that will just make it so much easier that I will not care about how bad the name is.
Okay. Summary time. What are the things I am saying I am going to do before I update this next?
Is that it? Maybe that's it. I gotta say, one of the other things that got me real energized to make music is I watched this video of two of the three members of Jukebox The Ghost playing a brand new song (the guitarist tested positive and was not there.)
And like, when you hear a piece of music that is ALMOST there, your brain just starts filling in the blanks sometimes, you know? Like it sounds great with synth bass and the drummer doing some BGs but I can HEAR the missing harmonies and missing guitar lead & big ol powerchords. And it's such a catchy melody that it's all I can think about. I have tickets to see them at the end of the month, I wonder if anyone else will know all the words?