working without thinking

If you flipped me over and looked at the back of my legs you would see a red dot just above the bendy area of my left knee, and a red dot above the bendy part of my right knee. Flip me over once again and you’ll find a red dot below the bendy part of my left elbow, and a red dot below the bendy part of my right elbow.
I don’t know what’s happening to me, but apparently I’m balanced.

Have I ever talked about how totally cosmic it was to record this album? How everything flowed so easily, and all seemed in the right place at the right time? I knew I shouldn’t have spoken so soon, or thought it was that simple.

The photo shoots for the album were hard enough to arrange. Photographers were not getting back to me, ideas were dead in my mind, I was second guessing everything, asking people’s opinions about too many things, trying to get people involved when I should have been just trusting my instincts all along. I finally pulled the trigger, found a great photographer that had been there all along, and went with my initial concept for the album. Shoot came and went with much success, and in the process found other great photographers for future shoots.
Then came the mastering. I had sent the appropriate CD’s to a friend in L.A. that had very kindly offered to sit in on the mastering session. They had mastered Peter Moore’s solo record, and it sounded great. A week went by and my peeps had still not received the disk, oh reliable USPS. I didn’t have a backup; those were with Peter who was on tour in Korea. I had to have him Fed Ex them from Korea to L.A. That was a project in itself. The CD’s got there safely. A week after that, the CD’s I sent via USPS got there….two weeks late.
The mastering went well and things sounded great. But upon closer listening, I realized there were some distortion problems on the first two songs. We are hoping that it was some gear malfunction, and that everything will be ok the 2nd time through. But we’re all nervous. I don’t know what we’ll do if it’s on the recording. We’d be fucked.

Despite these setbacks, I’m starting to work on the album art with a friend. I hope there’s a full album to go with it.

When telling two people about what songs were on the record, and after one of them hearing it, I got the same bummed out reaction about one of my newer songs not being on it. It’s probably the most poppy song I’ve written, ‘Luxuries of Poverty’, and I had really wanted to put the bitch on there, but it didn’t work. It didn’t click. So, that was reassuring.
It will have to go on the next record. I can’t believe I’m even thinking about a next record, but I was always thinking about the next record when I was recording this one. I don’t want it to be another 4 years before I release something. If I release something.

This record is basically going to be my testament of faith and perseverance. I think I’ll likely start second-guessing my ambitions if people think this record sucks a lot. I’ll always write, but……. I have no idea what that means. I really can’t imagine doing anything else. I can only imagine doing this bigger and better. But how many crappy musicians say that?
A lot of them.

I’ve heard them.

The question is, am I one of them?

Who knows? I can’t worry or care about this right now. I just have to take my strangely balanced spotty body and keep working without thinking.