I can't remember numbers.

If you tell me the address of someplace, I'll remember the street name, but not what number it is or how many miles away. If I read how much something costs, I can never remember, especially when they put that stupid .99 at the end. JUST SAY $5 AND STOP ALL THIS $4.99 BUSINESS. I also get my millions and billions mixed up and that makes me look stupid sometimes.

I got an email the other day from my bank telling me taxes were due and I had to approve payment by some date. I thought it was December 12, because I saw a 12 on the date thing on my computer. We still haven't had the 12th, yet, in case you were wondering. At any rate, this sent me into a panic because I thought I had 5 days to cough up, uhh, some amount of money I can't remember, but I know there were 4 digits. I just payed all my bills for December so I don't exactly have 4 digits in my business account, and thinking it was the 12th, I thought I had only a couple of days to come up with it.

Did I fail to mention that this is the slowest week I've ever had at work? Someone called last minute to book a color and cut and it doubled my total for the week. That's how slow.

So I teetered on the edge of panicking all day until that client came in and wrote her check. The value of the check wasn't was relieved my panic; it was the date on top of the check. Suddenly, I had ten more days than I thought I had.

Until they resent the email this morning, letting me know I had to approve payment by the 11th. How did I ever think Wednesday was the 12th?

I'm still debating whether or not I should panic about that stupid tax bill. Next week, while not history-making slow, is still pretty slow. [prayer]Please God, all those last minute caller-inners who usually make me insane, please let them call this week.[/prayer]

So that's basically how my week is going.

Ummmm no title.

A few weeks ago, someone suggested that I scale back my album project and turn it into an EP. I said I didn't want to do that, because I had finished a shorter project before (a three-song EP I gave out for Christmas a couple of years ago) and I wanted to branch out and go bigger.

But today, after recording the fourth scratch vocal for this project, I started dreading the prospect of writing and roughly singing seven more sets of lyrics. It's all getting dragged out too long. I listened to some of the other songs today for the first time in a while and I'm totally uninspired by them.

Later, on my way to 7-11 for a thing of Ben and Jerry's Turtle Soup, I had a brilliant idea: Scale back my album project and turn it into an EP! But with five songs. That's bigger than anything I've done, right? It's still moving forward at least.

So I'm going to finish the four new songs I'm working on and rework an old song that I've always thought deserved a little more attention than I gave it the first time around.

I think I've pretty much decided to stop feeling guilty about not working on music more or faster. I mean, it's MY music. I don't have a contract with anybody or anything. I don't know why I work so slowly/neurotically. I just do. I have a friend who can literally produce songs more frequently than BMs. That's his way of going about business. I finish an average of (just guessing here) three songs a year since I started making music.

Anyway, I'm waiting for a new piece of equipment to arrive and then it's make-it-work time for the backing tracks, which is my favorite part, I think.

It's just like that.

I struggle constantly to find the balance between need for inspiration and willingness to just buckle down and get it done. Not only in the creative process, either. When I'm inspired to clean my bathroom, I really enjoy doing it, the time taken flies by, and it is immensely satisfying. Sadly, I'm only really inspired to do it every couple of years, so I have to kind of do agonizing grumpy touch ups in-between.

I write this because I just had one of those A-HA! moments working on the lyrics for a song. (Not the "Take on Me" A-Ha. I WISH I had those kind of songwriting moments.) I'd been kind of kicking stuff around in my head for several days, as well as kicking myself in the ass for not just sitting down and getting the words written so I can hurry up and sing the demo. But I couldn't bring myself to sit down and do it. Suddenly, a twist on the original idea I had hit me and I couldn't help but get to work on it. In five minutes, I reworked the first verse and wrote the second (I've had the chorus done for ages). The end result is only about a million times better than where I had been heading with it before.

So, I guess what I learned today is to only ever do what I feel like doing.

Just kidding. I know that I might have never gotten to the point where these lyrics worked if I hadn't been rolling the ideas around in my head. I guess what I really learned is that rolling ideas around in your head counts as work.


Interesting, unrelated side note: Every single time I write a blog post, I have to go through and edit out my excessive use of the words "just" and "that." Actually, I've just changed the title so that this paragraph is no longer unrelated.

(See that last sentence? That's how they all are until I edit.)

And now for a random picture of what I look like today.

More boring music stuff

...for the sake of accountability. You all know how much I loooooove accountability. Actually, I do love healthy accountability. But I've seen an awful lot of unhealthy people "holding each other accountable" and even been one of those people.

How do you know if you're being held accountable in a healthy way? Well, the health of an accountability relationship is inversely proportional to the number of times the word "accountability" is used in the context of that relationship. The healthiest accountability partners don't usually even know they are your accountability partners. However, if someone calls you up to schedule an accountability meeting (and refers to it as such), you should decline and offer them the number of your favorite licensed professional counselor.

"Hold you accountable..." hm, I think that phrase needs to go into some lyrics somewhere...

Speaking of songs and lyrics...(and excessive ellipses...)

I just finished recording a VERY wonky scratch vocal for a heart breaking ballad. Nothing like a heart breaking ballad with a wonky vocal. It turns heartbreak hilarious, and I LOVE hilarious things.

So this is only the third song. I know, I know. I said on Sunday that I was going to record three scratch vocals on Monday, which would have made this the fifth song. Well, I only did one on Monday. I guess I have to be held accountable now. Here's a little secret about me: I'm super ambitious before it comes to actually doing something. Then I record one verse of a song and one chorus and then I need to take a little break for 9 hours or so and then there's no more time in the day to record the other two songs I meant to record. So see, it's not my fault. It's because the day is not long enough to contain my doing stuff time and my recuperation time.

So I only did 33.3% of what I set out to do on Monday. But guess how much I had planned to do today. NOTHING. And now I've done something, which is infinite% more than what I had planned to do. So I think that more than balances out.

They let you do it twice a day if you need to.

Well, my first STRAG session went great. I changed a couple of things about my setup to make tomorrow go even smoother. My friend Paul Sell will be elated to know that I've raised the mic so that I will now sing standing up instead of sitting on my couch hunched over my coffee table.

I also started prepping for tomorrow. I've got words for the next two and a half songs, so I hope to get all three sung by tomorrow evening. Finishing off the scratch vocals for the first song made me a little excited about the whole thing. It's true that they just don't feel like songs to me until they have words. I'll never start with the backing tracks again.

One of the songs for tomorrow is kind of a funny song about how Christians have gotten accustomed to using certain pat phrases over and over. Doing a little research, I just read this on someone's blog: "Join a prayer team. It is a treasure trove of Christianese vocabulary. Intercessors are the literati of Christianese. They wield a command of the nuances of the language that most Christians never understand. They can combine ordinary words like “walls, standing, tearing, gathering, anointing, clouds, heavenlies, earth, wind, fire, rain, and eagles” in ways that will give you goosebumps even though you have no idea what just happened."

Does anybody have any favorite "Christianese" clichés? I'm working on lyrics for this song and I am, of course, drawing a blank. Just throw anything out...things like, "traveling mercies" and "hedge of protection"... those things that roll off our tongues so easily and mean nothing to the majority of the world. I promise it's not going to be a mean song. Maybe a little mean. It'll be kind of like telling someone the truth in love. OOH! That's a good one!

Not that mean.

Short term, Realistically Attainable Goal Number One.

Or, STRAG #1, if you like.

To record, at the very least, one scratch lead vocal track for each of the potential songs for the album I'm working on by the end of this week. This means, of course, that all songs will have to have lyrics. It seems like a lot, but I have very low standards for what the vocals need to sound like. They can be pitchy, crackly, noisy, I don't care. They just have to be there.

I just set up a VERY simple vocal recording rig. In order to avoid potential distractions, I am moving myself away from my desk and it's 24" iMac. It's so pretty, sometimes I just stare at it for hours, accomplishing nothing. So I've plopped my trusty laptop onto my coffee table with an audio interface and mic and that's it. I even designed a highly utilitarian template in Logic that does not have any synths at all in it. Just 8 mono audio tracks to record vocals to and one stereo track for the demos I'll be singing along to.



Already I've ruined my own plan, of course. As I finished burning a disc of the demos on the iMac to bring over to the lappy, I remembered that I had decided to change the key of the very first track. Its melody will never accommodate my narrow baritone as it is and needed to be dropped about 3 half steps. For a moment, I thought I'd make a concession and just import the whole project but then I thought, "IRREGARDLESS!" The theme of this week is imperfect presence, as opposed to imagined perfection. So the demo for this song will have a strained uncomfortable vocal track. So what. Nearly nobody is ever going to hear it. It's just for me to play in my car to get more ideas of how to make the whole thing better. I'll just work on it in the wrong key and then transpose everything down before I record the better-possibly-final vocal.

So it's going to be a pretty busy week. I hope my neighbors are cool with hearing my voice all crackly and pitchy and with no effects or background tracks. Actually, I don't care if they are. They play horrible music at all hours of the night. I honestly think they were playing Rusted Root last weekend.

On another subject:

When I was little, I used to get so excited about things like birthday parties and Christmas that I would actually throw up. I thought I had outgrown this. But the other night, I was doing some recreational praying with my bestest bunch of friends ever and I actually got so excited praying that I had to run to the bathroom and throw up.

Just think about that for a minute.

Album 1.0

I'm working on an album.

There, I've said it. Out loud, on the internet. Now people will ask me about it and at some point I will have to finish it.

I've written (loosely) about 10 or 11 songs. They're all kind of rough sketches and several of them flat out suck. Some have potential. Who am I to judge? All I have to do is program some background tracks, sing them, mix them down and we're done. Simple. Not really. I forgot all the neurosis that goes on in between. They don't all quite have words. Some have words that I hate. A couple have basslines and drum tracks. They all have chord changes and melodies.

At the moment, I cannot seem to make myself sit down and work on it at all. I really want to, I think, and I think about it a lot. But there's a disconnection between my intention and the reality of putting my fingers on the buttons. I don't know if it's fear of failure or laziness or both. Probably both and more, but really I should just get over it. I've written songs before that people liked. This album has the potential to be the best thing I've ever done.

Then again, it also has the potential to be really mediocre, even if I work as hard on it as I can work. I think that's what stops me. I don't know if the work I put in will be worth the outcome.