Song #2: Rosalina

Since my upcoming single only contains two songs (which, really - shouldn't that be a "double"? Why am I even allowed to have two songs on a single release?), it'll be relatively quick and painless to give them both some blog attention.

So here it goes: Song #2, Rosalina. 

Rosalina is only barely less ancient than Set Me Down, in that it was born in 2014 instead of 2012. It does, however, proudly trace its origins to Atlanta instead of Augusta, so it can at least claim other musical brothers and sisters from the same city instead of existing as a total outlier like Set Me Down, its weirdo step-cousin from Augusta. I started recording Rosalina in my one-bedroom apartment in Virginia Highland, not an easy endeavor when you're vertically sandwiched between two other apartments separated only by creaky wooden floors dating back to the roaring twenties. Even so, I had a functional music space (pictured here, and this is the last time you'll see that stupid red chair, I promise) that gave me room to work and lay tracks down during the quiet gaps between passing traffic and odd thumps and yells from above and below. Like with Set Me Down, I opted to program computer drums rather than go through the agony of conjuring up a live drummer, a real studio, mics, and a few extra thousand dollars, but I went for a live drummer/acoustic kit sound instead of that whoa-this-is-definitely-robots vibe.

That part wasn't too hard. Like it does, though, the harsh light of 2017 once again revealed my vocal and acoustic guitar tracks to be garbage, so I stripped that shit down like Luke Bryan (:-|) and deleted everything except the drums to do some rebuilding (and ended up tweaking the drums a bunch too). I think I landed in a pretty good place - I've gotten better at vocal processing and was able to get a good, smooth sound on the lead vocals and the army of background vocals warbling at the end of the song, and I've got a microphone that makes it pretty hard to botch acoustic guitar too badly. I'm not about to land a partnership with Max Martin or Jack Antanoff or anything, but I'd like to think I'm improving on my own scale.

Also, somewhere along the way, I realized that the name "Rosalina" belongs to a character from Mario Kart, and... that's pretty much it. The name doesn't surface anywhere else. So that's something. Better Than Ezra has a very old song called "Rosalia", but there are no Mario Kart characters named Rosalia, so I think that means Better Than Ezra wins, like usual. Ah, well. Life's a bitch, or something.

These songs are both dropping sometime between now and January 12th (I'm not trying to manufacture surprises - I'm not a surprise factory - I just actually haven't decided yet), so keep an eye on the sky. Don't get dropped on.