This whole album project evolved somewhat naturally from my ongoing songwriting efforts. As far as I can tell, writing songs is the best writing medium for me. I’ve written short stories, novels, poetry, and plays, and in each case I feel that I was able to carve out something worthwhile from time to time, but it never felt all that joyful, and I rarely felt I was “onto something” or that I had found the story I had needed to tell, let alone that the characters were dictating what to write or any other such writing dreams.
Somehow writing songs is different. I think I was always trying to find the music behind the words and communicate at least as much on a lyrical plane as on the literal, pragmatic, prosaic level. So, anyhow, once I had written nine solid songs, I figured with a cover of “Who Loves the Sun?” to round out the set, I had the makings of a nice debut album.
At just the perfect time my old pal, musician, author, radio host, and raconteur David Gans offered to co-produce an album of my songs with his longtime partner-in-crime sound engineer Jeremy Goody of Megasonic. So, at the pace of roughly once a month since February, we’ve been going into the studio and recording basic tracks of my songs.
For the first session, instead of recording one of my first set of nine songs, instead I brought in a newer song I had just written, which still needed some arranging, “The Long Haired Kings.” This was the perfect way to get my feet wet in the studio and made it much easier to record songs that were more finished when the time came.
My song writing has slowed a bit with the recording and arranging work taking up so much of my spare musical energy, but it hasn’t stopped, and after Kings I wrote this song, “The Ghost Door,” which I feel is perhaps one of my strongest. It definitely gives me the heaviest feels when I sing it:
Which would bring it to eleven original songs except that I’ve been finishing up a little pessimistic punk rock number called “Some Other Time,” which we’ll record sometime next month, at which point we’ll have twelve tunes in the can with basic tracks and rough mixes. Then it will be time to figure out which songs are going to make the final cut, and then how to finish them!