Nobody Likes a Fish

I've been hitting the mixes for the past couple of days, mainly the "...Fish!" redo's.  I've already said it two or three times but I'm incredibly shocked by how well these tracks already sound in their redone mode and I probably should have wrapped this up a few years ago.  Having said that, my mixing technique is way better now so maybe it's not so bad that I waited.

The "It's Raining Elvis Fish!" album was originally released around 2009, I believe, and was met with incredibly poor reception.  It didn't really shock me because I wasn't very happy with it either, and after a few listens I myself thought it was near unlistenable.  The whole idea at the time was to record something quickly after the TFTO fiasco, basically to try and prove to myself that I could both do it and also that it could actually be done with the gear I had.  Rather than "ruin" another set of originals, I opted for an album of Robyn Hitchcock cover tunes, songs that I had always wanted to record anyhow.  In this manner, if it was total trash, well, who cares (well, sort of).

I had barely released it when I started working on the redo's.  It was the first time that I had ever submitted anything for mastering so I had no idea how much that process would improve the mixes.  Much to my dismay, it didn't help much at all, in fact it just made badly mixed and put together songs sound concrete.  The whole thing was very depressing, to the point that I vowed that I'd fix it.  And thus, yet another backlogged project was born.

Ironically, the original release was fairly on target time-wise.  I think it only took me a year or two from start to finish, which is probably the part that I should have dwelled on at the time since TFTO took up to 8 years and was never actually officially released.  In any event, I looked at the whole album and started making notes about what I would change.  When I originally recorded it, my intent was to keep it simple on purpose; it ended being the wrong approach.  I also wanted to try mixing an album fairly dry, getting away from the heavy reverbs I always liked.  That also backfired and instead I realized that my preference is, well, my preference, making things much more lush.

The idea of rereleasing this album will probably spark zero excitement due to what the original sounded like but, ironically, I think once people hear this version their opinion will greatly change.  Still, I may do some reworking of the track list here and there, of which I just started fiddling with a couple hours ago.  In general, I think these mixes will be done very quickly since there's not a ton that needs to be tweaked.  I suspect I may only have to do 3-4 passes on each which would certainly be a new record for me.

In general, I really like these tracks, hence my pushing forward.  I now have to think about what I'm actually going to do with this album, though.  To release it on CD, which would be my preference, might cost quite a bit due to the cover song royalties.  There are certainly equal royalties due for online downloads but they're much more easy to control since you pay a little at a time.

I had asked a friend of mine to come up with an outfit for a version of the big mouth bass doll so that it looked like Elvis.  I asked her to do this about a decade ago, of which she completed it fairly quickly.  The fish has been sitting in my room ever since, still waiting to be photographed.  Maybe at last it'll see the light of day and we can change people's opinions of "the Fish".  One can only hope.