Album Blogging

I’ve been thinking about this for a while – how to use the blog to help me finish my solo album. Today I’m starting something different.

Truth is I’ve been in a funk over the album for two reasons. First, I lost sight of why I was doing this collection of tunes in the first place. That’s what happens, I guess, when you start a project in one place, then try to finish it somewhere else, with a few dramatic moves and changes of career in between.

I’m pretty poor at getting things done when I lose sight of the big picture. I need a sense of how tasks fit into the grand scheme of things to stay motivated. But, my reasons for wanting to out out a solo album are very different now to what they were in 2003. Perhaps, in a perfect world, I would have already had one (or three) albums out by now, but there’s no point waiting for the perfect world to arrive.

What transpired was this – the vacuum left in this project by my changing circumstances became filled with the old bogey of all my musical projects – fear.

I love music, I think I always have. When I finished High School, the only clear vision I had for my future was a desire to play music and work in music technology (building guitars and effects). Of course, I’ve taken a lot of vocational paths, but music has been a constant, something I keep coming back to.

That’s rather telling because I’ve had some crushing defeats and disappointments in the musical world. I’ve seldom felt encouraged or supported in my music and I’ve wasted a lot of time over the years trying to win the favour of people I thought I had to please. There’s a lot of negatives there that I still struggle to overcome on a daily and during some sessions, on an hourly, basis.

Of course, that’s only part of the story, since music has brought me some great friends, filled my days joy and given me an outlet to express emotions and ideas that can only really find form in the mix of rhythm and melody. In recent months I’ve been able to focus more clearly on the these later positives and I am committed to carving out a greater space in life for them.

Thinking about that has helped me clarify what this album project is really about – something I will blog about when the songs are assembled. For now, I’m going to focus on blogging my way through the fabrication of the album.

For the next couple of months I’m going to write my experience of re-arranging and re-recording each tune for the album; starting today. Hopefully that will lift the lid on where I am up to, explain a little of what is involved in this kind of solo project and maybe even pass on a few things I’ve learnt about working with Logic Pro, Sibelius and Reason.