To December...and Beyond!
Get it? Because it’s, like, a Toy Story quote. You get it.
Also, you’re here, which is neat, and it’s December, which means it’s been almost two months since the last time I blogged on this blog, and that’s simply too long. To be fair to me, I haven’t blogged because I haven’t had any new releases to plug since the grand finale of my Award-Winning Monthly Single Release Project, and I’ve been way too busy surfing the crest of the tremendous, inevitable fame wave that swept me straight into the big time to sit down and write anything.
That’s not exactly true. BUT: I have been hard at work pulling together a new experiment for 2019, and this one is slightly more tried-and true: a new, full-length album that will contain somewhere in the neighborhood of ten songs and become suddenly available to you all at once when you're least expecting it. One fell swoop, baby. No slow-drip release, this.
I’ve got about five songs already simmering in various states of finality and five more resting peacefully in the pipeline waiting to be called up from the farm league (that’s a horrible, wonderful rat king of mixed metaphors that I’m going to leave as is) (don’t google “rat king”), and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get this thing stitched together and released by the middle of the year. That seems like a long way off, but if you’ve done me the courtesy of reading my previous posts, you’ll know that my songs tend to spend between five and seven years in purgatory before they’re actually let out into the open, so this tentative timeline is actually overly optimistic, if anything.
Dialing in that sweet, sweet drum sound.
What else can I tell you? For one thing, this new album going to be a bigger deal than my recent run of singles, at least in terms of sophistication and musicianship. I’ve got Deke Spears, the criminal mastermind who salvaged the wreckage of those singles, on board for mixing and bass-playing, and Brad Hagen contributing drums, so these songs are going to have that heady, fizzy full-band sound the kids are all clamoring for these days (lolz I have no idea what the kids clamor for anymore). If you’re paying too-deep attention to the Atlanta music scene, you may have already connected the dots to realize that Deke + Brad = 50% of Quiet Hounds are participating in my album, which I think is exceptionally neat. Because they’re, uh, really good.
I’ve got a new process worked out too, for anyone who’s interested in how the sausage gets made: now that I’ve got a loosely professional recording setup at my house, I’m tracking all the basic stuff over here (vocals, guitars, keys/synths), sending that off to Deke for bass and a preliminary mix, tweaking a little more on my end as needed, bringing Brad in to drum, and then adding/subtracting as necessary to work towards a final, all-inclusive mix. It’s a lot of back and forth, but it’s felt super-productive so far in that it lets everyone contribute their #bestself on their own terms. You like The Postal Service? Basically, this is The Postal Service, except I only live like twenty minutes from Deke. We can keep stamps out of this.
And that’s where I’m at. Everything is sounding pretty next-level at this point, and I’m looking forward to locking down something to share as the process moves forward. I’ll keep you informed as that happens, so don’t go anywhere.