2025 has been quite a year. I've worked harder this year than any year previously, and in all honesty I'm exhausted, burnt out, and so on. I do need a break. I pretty much knew this would be a tough year and my hope would be that I'd get through it and the path forward would be somewhat easier. I think that's sort of coming true, which is the good news.
I'm thinking right now that the "Mirror Land" EP will finally come out right around Thanksgiving. I've had more delays than I can count at this point and the number of iterations and mix changes is beyond belief. I hope I never have to do things in this manner again...but the whole goal was to put myself through a self induced training course on how to do mixing at least somewhat better. Why you ask? Because I have way too many things written to release and I'd never be able to send all of this out to someone else to mix for me. That's pretty much been my dilemma since 1996 and it's only compounded 100 fold over the decades.
The latest delay was a retooling of the bass. Not unlike the vocals that I did a deep dive on back in early summer, this was kind of similar and the end result seemed worthwhile, hence I went with it. Also, the song "Optimism" wasn't behaving anyway so I knew I'd be working on that for a few weeks anyhow so why not see what you can accomplish on the other ones as well? At this point, I'm pretty much back to a "I like what I have" spot but if I wait too long I'm sure my approach and techniques will once again be out of date, and the whole loop would start all over again, so my intent is to just cut this and run, calling it what it is. Time to move forward, I think.
Having said all of that, am I pleased with the outcome? Well, yes and no. I learned TONS. Is it perfect? No, but I wasn't ever going for perfection. Does it sound as good as if a pro mixed it? Hell no, but again that's not really my intent either. All I really want are the songs realized to a decent potential, and personally I think much too much is made of "perfect" mixing. Hell, we all lived just fine with the recordings of the late 70's early 80's from bands like Squeeze, the Clash, the Police, etc.
So, "Mirror Land" should be released very soon, like in the next 2-3 weeks. The Defrost Nixon album will be shortly after and right now I'm thinking the release will be right around January 1st. In 2 weeks, I'm working on recording the "Yet I Tried for You" EP, a 4 song EP of "newer" songs, and I expect that to come out around February. The only other thing getting squeezed in right now is probably the "Lost Weekend" remix which should also be more or less released around February/March of next year.
Things that got bumped in 2025 are the "Wrecking Ball" album and the remix of "It's Raining Elvis Fish!". Both will now be for the first half (hopefully) of 2026, and if I have any luck at all the new Jazz Loop Machine album will get squeezed in there as well. As a sidenote, I'm hoping to have some serious work down on the house in 2026 so if that does indeed happen, the rest of the year will be up in the air since I won't have access to do much recording or mixing during that timeframe.
That's the news over here. I'm really hoping each release sounds a bit better than the former, and if that does happen, then I'm on the right track.
No comments:
Post a Comment