Things have been going slowly but I am comforted by this. I have had a lot of stuff going on (mostly day job things) which is good because I have felt the sadness of small paychecks lately and now I am back in the Financial Security Pocket I think.
There's a thing that Ze Frank said once back in the day that I thought about a lot when I was a kid, which was how comforting it is to not completely act on your ideas, because in your head they are perfect and beautiful and fully realized. And the antidote to this is to get used to pushing out lots of little ideas so that your Good ratio is likely to improve, but also so you get used to learning from your own process, and also so you have infinitely more experience. And I feel kind of like I'm a child again, because the songs I am working on are very much Conceptual and I don't totally know what I'm doing. I feel like I've spent a lot of time in the Melody Mines, enough that I sort of know what I'm doing. I wish I could say that it is deliberate that I have pushed myself out of my comfort zone to make these sort of punchliney, sort of Negativland/Joshua Fried-y pieces of sample-driven music, but it is truly just The Thing That Happened To Interest Me now. (Actually maybe I should talk to Joshua. You know what, I bet if I cold emailed Negativland one of them would talk to me too.)
And so it is hard to get going. I've got a handful of songs that I've retooled over and over again, not totally content with how they actually turned out, and I still have quite a handful of songs that I am, I guess, scared to let out of my brain and into an audio project file, because I know how much work it's going to take to get it to resemble the amorphous ideal form that nebulously exists in my head only.
But! On the extreme contrary, I am excited by how different this is to my normal workflow and I have convinced myself that I am less precious about this project than the rest of the stuff I've made, mostly because I have nothing from my past to compare it to. The reason I got excited about making the first OK Glass stuff (Can't Turn It Off and thereabouts) was exactly because I was spending like 5 years working on Sand and getting nowhere, and so I dropped everything and made a whole new thing in like a year. This project feels like that again.
Not all of the songs are like that, though. Or well, maybe they're not like that in an obvious way. I honestly don't know if people noticed or cared about the (to my mind, VERY obvious) samples in 🕴️⤵️🕳. I think there are quite a few songs where the samples are much more overt and blunt and unavoidable. But also there's just like, regular songs with me playing a lot of instruments and singing like normal. Even though in my head I'm like "This is the experimental sampley album" that's only like half of the songs probably.
Um, all this to say I am excited about the idea of putting out something that will not be able to live on Spotify or maybe even Bandcamp, something that will just exist on my website. Kind of standing away from the other songs I have released in a Commercial way, something hard to compare to the rest of the stuff. I don't think the songs are as Good as the ones on my other albums, at least not in the same way I like those songs. Is this a totally bonkers thing to say about my own things. I don't know, maybe it's just that I feel like when I put 8 years into making something then I feel like it's 8 times the effort and I wouldn't put that much effort into something I felt ambivalent about - when I put out all those like half-finished b-sides after the first album it was very much a clearing of house, me banishing all the songs I don't want to have to keep working on, with the pleasant side effect that some people listened and enjoyed it. (Sometimes people ask me to put it on like spotify or cds and I am like I am not going to put in the effort to make these songs ready for primetime, please enjoy my free mp3s.)
I think that's it for today, bye
Aaron Carter died!! What! It feels weird that I am working on an Aaron Carter cover now!!
It's not really a, tribute, to him,,, he was kind of,,, an unpleasant,,, person in a lot of ways in his later life,,, I just,,, well, it's a silly little song about the early internet and it would fit perfectly on this record, and I've wanted to cover it for like 5 years now and gotten a lot of people on board, and also I thought me covering it without paying the licensing fees would be another reason to Keep This Album Out Of The Music Industry Machine. I was always kind of scared to do it because I feel like his internet presence was kind of aggressive and I was not confident there was a 0% chance he wouldn't find it and yell at me.
But also I think when I was a kid (I am like a few years younger than him I think) it was very obvious to me that it was like the music industry hedging their bets, get the baby sibling of a Backstreet Boy and see if you can turn him into the new 10 year old Michael Jackson for the 1990s. It obviously didn't work, I honestly don't know if he even made more than one album, but as a kid it was very hard to feel any sympathy to this impossibly famous child who I suspected was being eaten alive by corporate interests.
Okay I have looked it up and he indeed had one album before The Famous One and then like two after as a child, and then two or three as an adult in the last 5 years? And the adult ones have like reasonable reviews?? What a weird planet we are cursed to live on.