I'm working on my "final" round of "Mirror Land" mixes and it's filled with mixed emotions. My initial feeling is total relief that it's finally going to have a period after it, done, complete-o, etc. The second emotion I have is similar to losing an old friend, one that's been hanging around for quite awhile that's hard to say goodbye to. Third, whereas I'm pleased with the overall result, it's still not "perfect" even after all of this time. Hmm.
The "Mirror Land" EP ended up being my training ground, the EP where I basically tried to kick things up a few notches, learn some new tricks, and so on. The number of iterations that I've done on this is literally absurd and I won't even share the actual number apart from saying that it's greater than 100 mixes per song. I could probably tinker with these for the rest of my life but why bother? Also, I finally reached the point where I think everything that I can make better in the mix is done and now I'm starting to scrutinize the actual recording more, which is never a good road to go down this far along in the process. No, it's much better to just cut and run and I learned that a long time ago, although you wouldn't know it from the number of iterations on this one.
I'm thinking I'll be submitting these for mastering at the end of this week. I'm not sure how backed up the mastering engineer is so it could still be another 2 weeks before the release. Obviously, I have multiple projects being juggled so I have no fear of being bored in the meantime.
Once this is completely wrapped up, the challenge now moves onto a new plateau, the one where I need to figure out how to do all of this in a rather "quick" method. The Defrost Nixon album is the first to go through this test and I guess we'll know how well this plays out fairly soon since that album is supposed to be released in about 2 months.
In the meantime, I decided to face the facts which seem incredibly daunting to me. I wrote down yesterday all the releases that I would like to make. In case you're not aware, I think I'm a bit of an anomaly, not that I'm the only person who probably has a bit of this situation but I do think it's unusual and I would think most people aren't as far along as I am. I started writing "albums" pretty much from the get go, back in 1990, and not having a good method of recording them back then nor the cash to go to a studio (or any support whatsoever), rather than getting discouraged, I just kept writing album after album. In writing everything down yesterday, I have 17 original music albums to my credit...and only 2 to this date have been released. At the end of this year, I should have a total of 4...so, um, 13 to go, if I'm to catch up. Yeah, exactly.
Most people would have given up by now. Hell, most people would have given up after album number 3, but alas I'm a bit different. This all made me stop and think a bit, and let's also keep in mind that I'm not including all these EP's for those aren't complete "albums". In short, I have a sh*t load of material, more than anyone I know and probably more than many professional musicians/writers.
Considering my age and all, I think the only way to attack this is to try and release about 4 albums per year. Now, to be fair, some of these albums are half to 70% recorded already (luckily) but at least 7 of them haven't even been started. Recording, mixing, and releasing 4 albums per year while working full time sounds pretty ridiculous, no? I think the truth of the matter is that I'll absolutely have to share the mixing love with someone else or I'll never get through this, and/or I'll drop trying. So, ironically, after tons of rounds of trying to learn mixing to a semi decent degree, I guess I'm still going to have to turn some of it over to someone else.
So, what's the plan? I guess the short version is to pretty much have my entire album backlog available for listening within the next 5 years. If I can somehow figure out how to do this and not perish from this Earth beforehand, I think I should get into the Guinness Book of World Records as the person that released the most albums ever, no? I guess we'll see. It'll be interesting to see where this all goes...hopefully somewhere.
In the meantime, if you're so inclined, please pick up a copy of "Mirror Land" and/or a t-shirt, and maybe get one for a friend or relative as well. Honestly, any little bit helps in this endless parade of trying. One thing is for sure and that's that I'm a damn stubborn individual who doesn't like to give up or have material go to waste.
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