2021 has been an interesting year filled with a retinal detachment, a new album, new gear, and so on. I feel reasonably accomplished (I admittedly could have done w/o the eye issues) but I do wish things had gone a bit better and more smoothly. I can't say that I had bargained for yet another year of COVID hiding but it also doesn't really surprise me.
It's been a slow wind up but I just started kicking the dust off of the ideas that I have for the next Jazz Machine album. As of right now, the next album is to be called "Sorry, I Forgot to Mention This..." but that could certainly change a million times over. The background...when I was trying to come up with the last track for "I Miss You Most at Nighttime", which ended up being "Didn't I Tell You?", I accidentally wrote 3 other new songs that will be making their way to this new album, and those are the ones that I'm starting to work on. I also think this album might have 1-2 cover tunes; I'm simply not sure yet.
I'm still getting used to my new gear setup which has also been giving me some issues here and there. This is exactly why I don't like to upgrade software versions since you suddenly feel like you've never used the software before since things are moved around, labeled differently, etc. I wish I could have stayed on my old version of ProTools but unfortunately it wasn't approved to run on the Mac Mini that I purchased so I basically had no choice but to upgrade. I will say that I so far prefer the old version.
Like everything computer related, though, it's just a matter of working through it, getting comfortable, and so on. The next JM album will be considerably more upbeat and "louder" than the previous, and that's sort of intentional. It'll have a bit of a different sound overall, I think, while still remaining true to the groundwork that I've already laid. I'm targeting to have this album done and possibly released exactly a year from now. Apart from it, the only other "new" music I'm working on is the last few tracks for the upcoming "The Beautiful Silence" vocal album which has been in the writing phase for quite some time. It's basically my follow-up to the still unofficially released "Theories for the Opsimath" and would be my first album of it's kind in quite awhile. I'm extremely excited about it since I think I have some of the best vocal material I've written in a very long time waiting in the wings. These are the only two "new" works I'll be working on for quite some time, though, and everything else is a project that's been half in progress for who knows how long. It's simply time to finish up all these other ones sitting around, collecting dusts.
I'll be writing a lot about the new JM tracks as I record them so you'll hear about it here first. Wishing everyone a very happy New Year with hopefully nothing but good vibes awaiting us...