Life/Music in the Time of Coronavirus

If there’s any sort of silver lining to a worldwide pandemic and the sort-of-mandatory-but-also-being-ignored-by-way-too-many-people isolation and self-quarantining that comes with it - and there’s not much of once, obviously this is devastating - it’s that, if I don’t want to get so bored that I start creeping around the walls or go full Jack Torrance, I have time (so much goddamned time) to finish up this music project. As these things tend to do, it’s dragged on for way longer than it was supposed to, in part because, after lots of experimentation with various great options, I’ve clawed back all my songs to mix them myself. Turns out I have really strong opinions about how I want my songs to sound, and I also love having the time and flexibility of working random ideas into my songs as they occur to me in my home studio, so here I am: way behind schedule but stocked up with a selection of recordings that actually come pretty close to representing the way the songs sounded in my head.

Shameless, definitely staged posing in the studio.

Even though I’ve ripped back the reins of this thing to steer it where I want, I’m working hard to be more collaborative through the tracking process, and as a result this album/EP/whatever is going to showcase a significantly wider range of individual creative voices than my output has in the past. I’ve got Deke (of Quiet Hounds fame and the puppetmaster behind my 2018 single releases) providing bass and some auxiliary instrumentation throughout, and I’ve got some guys in Nashville picking some banjo and trumpeting some trumpet. The end result is way better than it would have been if I tried to do everything myself (like, I played trumpet in middle school, but I doubt I could convince a trumpet to make any pleasing noises in 2020), and that’s a lesson I’ll take with me for future projects.

So, yeah! In between wrapping up my current job this week, hiding out in my house indefinitely, and starting a new job in April, I’m gonna take a few weeks to polish up these songs and try and shape them into some kind of cohesive package for your consumption. Note my broadness: I will try; I’m gonna take a few weeks. I’m done making empty promises related to hard deadlines. It’ll be done when it’s done, and as soon as it’s done, I have about thirty more songs I want to immediately start recording. But I’m not doing nothing over here, and when I finally do release this album into the world, I think the extra time I’m spending on it is going to be audible.

As of now, here’s the final tracklist, in no particular order:

Cardinal Red

Josephine

Miss You

Part of This

Bend

Everything’s Cool

Paris Again

I’m fighting the urge to round out this list with an additional song to make it an even eight - it’d be fun to, for instance, pull together a definitive recording of Acting, which I wrote back in 2004 or so and then released as a series of, ah, lacking studio recordings. In fact, just to give you something to listen to, here they are! If nothing else, they’re a weird comparison of my pre-and-post-tonsilectomy singing voice as it sounded well over a decade ago.

See? Not great. They both have some salvageable ideas, and the 2004 version actually sounds pretty clean after listening back to it, but I think it could be pretty killer if I gave it another shot today. Then again, I need to quit extending this release.

For reference: me in 2004, playing bass for some reason and flicking you off.

WHAT WILL LEWIS DO?! Next time, on The Wirelight Diaries.