So this is it. I've sent off the acoustic demo with C. tonight to deliver to her contact tomorrow. I'd be cool and say that it sounds like all the covert illegal action, but it's really rather mundane. There was me obsessing over the quality of the vocals and the EQ of the final mixes… (these are just guitar/voice recordings anyway), only to have it handed over to someone who's never heard of me or seen me play live. Clueless, only basing their decision on what they hear on the CD.

But the amazing thing in all of this is how much C. believes in me! I'm so overwhelmed by it. She keeps saying how sad it is that no one has made me feel this before, but it's gotten to the point that it's just time to work. To do…. To make this happen. I know ageism is a big factor in music, and I'm definitely not going for any popular angle musically speaking, but it is out there. I feel validated by all of this… this motion, these actions. I'm no longer doing this just to get it off my chest, or to maybe put a smile on the face of someone I know. It's become something a bit bigger than myself, beyond my control. Like Henry Miller said… One day I woke up and just was.
And so somehow, these five songs later, I am.

(demo handed over, I now find I cannot sleep. Again....)

I can't sleep.

It's the end of Memorial day weekend and I should be finishing off those mixes, but the board has decided to require a bit of maintenance. No surprise. It's been a workhorse recently anyway.

I'm tired, and there's not much to write. I just wait for the rains to come to the city. I need the patter of raindrops on my window and the rumble of thunder to release this tension in my soul. Maybe I'll light a stick of incence, watch the line of smoke rise like a swami's rope... a rope held by God... held by no one.

(there is a light that never goes out........)

Another night game at Wrigley field, and that means the undulating roar of drunk sports fans (the absolute worst kind of drunk in Western society), and no recording possible this evening. That's o.k. by me tonight, though. I am feeling rather burned out from the frantic mixing and mastering from the previous evening.

God, this is boring.

I honestly don't know how writers manage to talk about themselves and their thoughts without sounding pathetic.

See, I want to start this online journal so that I can at least have a decent website but now that I actually have to fill it with entries, I don't know what you write. Can't write anything true because God knows who will find it. I guess I'm not that open or insane or whatever.
And of course censoring myself is a surefire way to be boring. "So don't do it then!" is the resounding cry from the nut gallery.... Uhm, ok. But I don't think it's in my best interests to do so.

Or maybe it is.

So onward about the recording. See, my friend C. bumped into someone she used to know from her recordstore days and it seems that he's bridging his midlife crisis with the need to start a record label and produce music. Good opportunity for me, she said, and has since been campaigning on my behalf so that I can get a deal on this guys fledgling label. Good deal for me. So today was the day that she was supposed to meet with the guy to give him my demo.... Which I swear is an asshair away from being done. In fact, I'd stayed up all night and well into the dawn to finish mixing the 5 tracks I'd already recorded.

The problem comes in with the vocals. There are 5 tracks on the demo, 3 originals and 2 covers. 2 of the originals are solo guitar instrumentals (which this guy seems to be producing) so those were just a matter of capturing the performance. These are by no means perfect (due to audible click tracks at the end and other minor annoyances) but the vocals... it's where I always fall apart. I never know how to capture my voice correctly when recording, much less deal with the fact that I'm just not the greatest singer around. So it was rather frustrating not being able to re-record the vocals in the middle of the night, and just sorting through the takes I already had. It doesn't help much that I live in an apartment with a psycho mousefart bitch downstairs who comes up and kicks my door down if I so much as walk through my own apartment with my shoes on....

So today was the big meeting, and I swore that I'd get up at 9 am (after passing out around 6:30am) and re-record those vocals and then master the tracks and somehow take the bus/train/bus combo and get my butt out to the suburbs to turn in the demo and get this underway. Of course it didn't happen like that; there was some sort of construction going on at a building down the street and there were saws and a constant electric generator running. Obviously not going to help give me the silence I need in the background of recorded tracks, and I could only sit around and wait for that to finish. My body is a wreck now. I'm exhausted.
I freaked by 1 p.m because I knew there was no way that even if they did finish, I'd never be able to get the vocals redone (hoping on the miracle that my voice would somehow sparkle for that one hour window for all 3 tracks) as well as trudge through the glacial pace of remixing the tracks with new vocals and then kicking them off to the computer for rudimentary normalizing and mastering.

And yet, now at almost 7 p.m., I still have excitement for all this. :) I'm pooped, but this extra time means I can go back, redo the guitar and vocal for one the tracks, and just keep doing the vox until they come out brilliant! Hehe..... so this might all be a good thing. :) Well, it will be better once my head stops throbbing.

So I'm off to catch the nightboat, and see where it takes me tonight.

(written at JavaCha Cafe... go there for all your BubbleTea needs!)