Getting Close

 I had a pretty productive weekend despite the distraction of Wimbledon.  It did help a bit that it was Djokovic in the Men's Final, someone that I don't have quite as much interest in watching win yet another major title, so I certainly wasn't glued to the television.

I dare say that the "jazz machine" album is getting really close at this point.  You'll notice I'm still putting that name in quotes and it's basically because I'm still toying with other names (I've got about 10 of them at this point).  My biggest task between last weekend and this weekend was to get the drums nailed down for the song "I Can't Bear to Look In Your Eyes", the last track I really have to work on, and I clocked in at least 8+ hours on that very task last weekend.  I did a bit more tweaking this weekend but probably only clocked another hour or so specifically on the drums.  9 hours on getting an EZDrummer track nailed down is anything but, well, "easy", as they say.

"...Can't Bear..." remained my focus this weekend, though, and I finally got around to flushing out the bridge portion which is basically a completely different minute and half of music wedged in between the two main parts of the track.  I'm pretty pleased with the result, and I even got to add acoustic guitar to it using the new Breedlove C25/W which is slowly but surely sounding a bit better after hanging out in a humidified room for 2+ weeks.  The song is really starting to take shape and it's clocking in right around 7 minutes total.

My official/unofficial personal "deadline", or 'year of working on it' marker for the "jazz machine" album, is August 7th.  At this point, I actually think I may make it and be done with the album since it leaves me about 4 more weekends total.  If I don't make it, it'll be extremely close either way and I guess it's not really something to kill myself over.  My real point was that I wanted to prove to myself that I COULD actually get an entire album written/recorded, etc., within one year's worth of time.  I've said it a thousand times but I'm pretty sure that, if I didn't have to work full time for a living, I could get most of my albums done within 1 month...but alas that's not my reality.

I'm entertaining the idea of revisiting my "Foreshadowing" instrumental album post this work being done.  "Foreshadowing" was the album that I started working on in 2000 right after "Lost Weekend" and simply abandoned because, like most things that I started back then, it was just a tad too ambitious at the time.  I definitely have the technology to work on it now so that may just become my next target project.  It would be great for that one to finally see the light of day since I think there's some really interesting experimental pieces on there.

I also listened to an episode of WTF with Danny Elfman about a week ago and was shocked to hear that he and I have more in common than I knew.  He mentioned how the worst thing in the world to him was playing the same song every night in his band Oingo Boingo, and that he basically can't even play the same songs over and over.  I've been saying this forever myself and it would drive me nuts when the band's I was in would want to rehearse the same song over and over.  It never failed but I would almost always play it worse and worse every time and it was never intentional.  I don't have ADD or anything like that but I just can't do things in this manner and it just bores my beyond words.  I can't even imagine being someone like Tom Petty who was basically forced to play the same 12 hits night after night, year after year.  It just sounds like pure torture me.

I'm slowly but surely getting closer to that "first listen" of the "jazz machine" album all the way through, from start to finish, burned onto a CD and played on my stereo system.  I can't deny that I'm incredibly curious to hear it and quite excited to share it with others.  I'm hoping it's my best work to date but I guess we'll have to wait and see.