|
Thursday, August 06, 2009
 |
Category: Music
I began threatening to record and release a full-length album of my songs somewhere around 1998. At that time, I'd been focusing on writing songs with the idea that other singers and bands would record them and take them out into the world. My recordings prior to that point were intended solely as song demos, to let other artists consider whether they wanted to record the songs. However, there were some of those songs that didn't seem like the sorts of songs that other artists would record, even though some of those were ones I considered to be among my best. Perhaps the way to get those out into the world might be to record them myself?
Backing up a bit, I'd always enjoyed singing and playing music, having bands from approximately the sixth grade through the end of high school. I'd also been writing my own songs since approximately junior high or early high school. I started experimenting with recording, including doing some early multitrack experiments going back and forth between two cassette decks, while I was in high school. Thus, the idea of recording my own songs wasn't all that new. Somewhere along the line, though, I'd decided I was too old to have a real chance at success as an artist in the modern, youth-oriented music business. My best odds at making a living in that business would be as a songwriter, with younger, more video-friendly artists recording my songs. By early 1998, I was also married with two children in elementary school, so the notion of touring and other recording artist-like activities seemed pretty remote, despite my never having lost interest in those activities.
I think the first song I recorded with an eye toward possibly releasing it directly at some point was an early version of "Portadown Rain". The song was very long by commercial radio standards, had an unusual form, had an extremely sad story, and was politically charged to boot. In other words, it wasn't exactly the sort of thing pop or country hits are made of. On the other hand, it was a powerful song that would later be nominated for a Just Plain Folks Song Award, and which was drawing highly positive reactions on the live front. It wasn't so much that I was looking to abandon the whole "outside songwriter" orientation, but rather that I was looking for a home for those songs I wrote that didn't happen to fit the commercial mold, but which were still strong songs. In the commercial songwriting world, those were often referred to as "artist songs", because they are songs that would generally only get recorded and released if they were written by the recording artist. The "outside songwriters" (i.e. people writing songs for others to record and having no business connection with the artists looking for songs) only had a fighting chance if a song was deemed a potential hit single. Even a potentially great "album track" (e.g. think "The Last Resort" from Eagles' Hotel California album) wouldn't have a chance.
That initial recording of "Portadown Rain" didn't prove to be of sufficient production quality for releasing directly. In fact, on the front end of my quest to put together an album of my own, that was the norm. My production skills simply weren't up to snuff, and some of the tools I was using were also fairly limited for what I was trying to do with them. It would take a number of years before I finally starting hitting my stride on that front. My first tease with that came in Fall 2001, when a song I'd written about the events of September 11, 2001, "Help Us Understand", got played on the radio in Western Australia. Then in Fall 2002, I placed a newly recorded version a Christmas song I'd written, "It Started in a Manger", on a multi-artist charity album called Ho Ho Ho Spice, alongside recordings by a number of independent artists, including a few I'd actually heard of prior to receiving my copy of the album. While I look back at those recordings now, and hear them as not having been of a quality I'd want to release at this point, that little bit of external encouragement motivated me all the more to get to work on an album.
Meanwhile, though, I started seeing more acceptance of my songs in the form of other artists' recording them and putting them out on their own independently-released albums. Additionally, starting around mid-2002, I signed a series of single song deals with a Nashville-based publisher who was targeting major label artists exclusively. The result was that I backed away from my album plans to focus even more on the outside songwriting. I guess I was hoping that big break -- a major cut in the country market -- might finally be on the verge of happening, and such a success might help open some doors to complementary opportunities down the line. There wasn't any rush on my own album. It was more important to try and get some music business income flowing so I could keep at this work I love indefinitely.
Unfortunately, despite some localized success, such as a young Mongolian pop singer's taking one of my songs to top five for both radio and video play in her country, the bigger successes did not materialize. As time passed, it became clear that the songs signed out in Nashville weren't getting cut, and all of those songs ended up reverting to my co-writers and me by early 2006. As much as I'd viewed, and still do view, that I have a number of songs that could be hit singles, and maybe even classics, if matched with the right artists and promotion, I'd spent well over two decades pursuing success as an outside songwriter, with little to show for it. I had on the order of a dozen independent cuts, but wasn't even breaking even on the financial front. Artists I'd thought would have big potential had either gotten into situations where "life got in the way", gone on to write all their own material, or arrived at a level of success that didn't look to unknown songwriters for material. So much was dependent on other people to even let a song get out into the world, and there were so many competing interests. It felt like the bottom had dropped out.
Nevertheless, I wasn't ready to give up. I was determined to get my songs out into the world. If I felt powerless to do that via the route I'd been taking, perhaps it was time to try another avenue I could more directly influence. Perhaps it was time to revisit my original passions of singing and playing music, and my long-time goal of putting out an album. The music business had changed a lot over the years. Technological developments like home studios had come along to the point where it was much more feasible for an individual, working on an almost non-existent budget, to record a quality album. Market developments, such as the Apple iPod and iTunes, had made it possible for even independent artists to get national, and even international, distribution with little upfront costs, and without even manufacturing CDs. The rise of the Internet, including developments such as MySpace, made it possible to get the word out about new artists and music far beyond what had been possible just a few years earlier. I'd been keeping abreast of all these developments. Perhaps I could take advantage of them to get my songs out into the world in a new way.
Of course, a full album is a pretty big project, and there is a lot more involved than just recording songs, from administrative considerations such as licensing co-written songs to dealing with artwork, packaging, and distribution. I decided to start with a single, "The Lord's Prayer", for which there were at least no separate licensing considerations. I also set up a MySpace account to try and shift from just marketing my songs to recording artists to being able to more directly communicate with music lovers. That first single was released in May 2006. I followed it up later the same year with the release of That Time of Year, a four-song Christmas EP, which included a few co-written songs, thus causing me to figure out how to deal with licensing co-written material. I felt like I was finally starting to hit my stride on the production quality front, but this also meant that I felt like all the recordings I'd made prior to that period weren't at a level I'd be willing to release to the public. Finishing a full album would take awhile.
While I might now mark late 2006 or early 2007 as the beginning of my true push to record and release a full-length album, I interrupted those efforts on a number of occasions between then and now to tackle some smaller projects. Those included three more singles ("Bubble Gum", "Spam It", and "Halloween"), a cover of the classic hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers" on the multi-artist Goodnight Kiss Records album ALTARnative Music: Songs of Christian Faith, and a 5-track/2-song set of duets with Beverly Bremers (Make Me Feel). While each of those efforts took time away from the album recording effort, they also gave me vehicles to release songs that didn't fit the album concept I had in mind. The net is I really didn't start focusing more fully on the full album until late 2008. Things got particularly intense on that front in the first two quarters of this year, thanks to the deadline I'd set for myself of having the album ready in CD form in time for my July 12th show at the Orange County Super Fair.
The new album, which is called Love Holds On, is now available (see http://rickpaul.info/rpstore.html for the latest list of outlets carrying it). The album title comes from a song of the same title that I wrote with Rebecca (Shari) Hanneman back in 1997. Shari wrote the lyric, which I immediately loved, and which made the music flow very quickly. That song has long been one of my personal favorites, and one I thought would have big promise for the right artist. I consider it to be among my most beautiful melodies, and I also love the sentiment the lyrics express, which is summarized in the chorus: Love holds on
Fear lets go
Love is steady, love is strong
Love holds on
Though a few artists have recorded it on their demos over the years, none have actually released it to date. Meanwhile, I'd come to use it as the closing song for most of my full-length live shows, so I felt strongly that it would make a good anchor song for the album.
Though I'd considered a few other album titles over the time I'd been working on this album, the more I thought about the phrase, "love holds on," the more I realized that phrase could be interpreted a number of ways. Of course, there is the obvious notion of holding on to romantic love, such as in a long-term relationship, and that is my primary interpretation of the title song. However, it could just as easily refer to the trials we parents experience in the course of raising our children, needing to hold on out of love even when things seem out of control. It could refer to the love we have for a long-term friend as the relationship evolves over time. It could refer to the love we maintain for loved ones even after they are no longer physically present in our lives. It could also refer to what keeps us going when the going gets tough in pursuing our passions through rejection after rejection, something I could personally relate to with my love of music and trials of the music business. In short, it had a lot of potential as a theme for the album. All the songs I chose for inclusion on the album relate to that theme in some way.
When I started writing this blog, I thought I'd give a bit of history of the album then dive into talking about the songs themselves. To avoid writing another War and Peace, though, I think I'll cut this off now, then talk more about the individual songs in future blogs. In the meantime, though, I'd encourage you to have a listen to the songs, to see what you think. The widget below will let you play most of the songs I've released to date. If you want to play only the songs from Love Holds On, simply scroll down to the song of that title, then click on that and start playing it. The rest of the album will play in sequence after that. (Note that the "Buy" button in the widget goes to iTunes. If you are interested in getting it on CD or from another digital download store, go to http://rickpaul.info/rpstore.html for a complete list of outlets.) I hope you'll agree that the results were worth the long wait. Or should I say that I hope you'll find this long-term "labor of love" worth "holding on" for?
Powered by  | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|
|
Friday, May 01, 2009
|
Current mood:  crazy
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes
I've been noticing lately that the level of activity here on MySpace seems to have tailed off significantly over the past year or so. Is it just me, or has the party peaked or even left the building? Meanwhile, after having been on Facebook for a half a year or more with virtually no activity, the communications there seem to be flowing at a fast pace. I've noticed that I am spending less and less time on MySpace. I might be tempted to say that is because I've been spending so much time on Facebook because the party has moved, but that would only be partially true. Yes, it seems like more and more people are engaging over there, including some of my MySpace friends who almost never contact me on MySpace anymore, but have been in even more regular contact since Facebook started picking up (i.e. for me personally -- I know a number of people who have been much more regularly using Facebook for a long time). While I initially found Facebook's quirky interface concepts kind of like trying to sit down and read a novel written in Greek (I don't read Greek), either they've made some vast strides or I've just gotten used to the quirks, because it does seem like it is easier to keep in touch with friends over there. However, that is only part of the story, not all of which is about Facebook versus MySpace. Another part of the story that is about Facebook versus MySpace, specifically as it applies to songwriters, bands, and others who initially came to MySpace mainly with the notion of promoting their music or other wares, but who also found that they developed new friendships in the process, is that Facebook makes it possible to distinguish between friends and fans. With MySpace, you're either friends or not friends. (You can work around this by having two accounts, one for personal use and one for your band, but then it is double the work.) If you invite a musician to be your friend because you like their music, odds are you're also inviting them into your personal life, to see family photos and such, whether or not you really want to do that. With Facebook, on the other hand, you can sign up to be a fan of a musician without letting him be your friend. You can still interact with the musician similarly to how you interact with friends, but he won't be able to see your personal photo albums and other info, unless you've made that information public. By the same token, you could be personal friends with a musician without becoming a fan, in the sense of signing up for notifications about his musical efforts -- kind of like being friends with a neighbor without getting embroiled with all the news about what he does for a living. This is also useful from the musician's end, because I know that communications I send out to my "fans" (i.e. people who've signed up as a fan on Facebook) are going to people who are interested in my music, instead of my brother, my cousin, old high school friends, and so on. Also, I don't have to worry about sharing personal details with people I don't know just because they like my music. Of course, people can be both friends and fans if both parties agree to the friend relationship (anyone can sign up as a fan without the musician's agreement). Not everything is rosier in Facebook land, though. For example, the music pages are very hard to find -- you really have to have a link, because the URLs are totally non-intuitive (e.g. my musician page is http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rick-Paul/6208021724 -- you'd pretty much have to be a hacker to figure that out without a link!). While people I didn't know ahead of time have found me there (and also some people I did know, but didn't know were on Facebook), I'm always amazed when that happens because I even have a hard time finding the page myself. In fact, I put a link to it in my normal Facebook profile mostly to make it easier for me to get to that page when I want to check it. This makes it not as easy to find new fans, though the facilities Facebook provides to keep signed up fans up to date are quite useful, not to mention easier to use and more effective than those MySpace provides. Anyway, as I said above, the amount of time I've been spending on Facebook is only part of the story on why I haven't been as active around here as I have in the past. The other key reason is that the last six months or so have been extremely hectic for me, on both the music and life fronts. For privacy reasons, and because I wouldn't want to bore you with all the details anyway, I won't go into the personal stuff, with one exception. That one exception is that my daughter is a senior in high school this year. Thus, we started visiting prospective colleges last October, then had all the application-oriented stuff to do. By that time, the holidays were rolling around, with tax season and financial aid application season coming around shortly thereafter. Once decision time rolled around, it was time to take care of the offer acceptance admin, and to make another trip to her chosen college (University of California, Berkeley) to get a better picture of what we'll need to do between now and the time she heads off to campus in August. If you're feeling dizzy just reading this, you get the picture. On the music front, I've been busy in two primary areas: In my capacity as a music software reviewer for CakewalkNet.com, I wrote three in-depth software reviews between December and March, and I still have one more to finish somewhere between now and the end of June. My musician friends may be interested in checking out my recent reviews of Cakewalk SONAR 8 Producer Edition digital audio workstation, IK Multimedia T-RackS 3 Deluxe mastering software, and Sample Modeling Mr. Sax T. virtual tenor saxophone. I'll also be reviewing the Garritan Authorized Steinway Virtual Piano (Basic Edition) in the next couple of months. All four products have already found their way onto my recent recordings. My main focus at the moment, though, is finishing my first full-length album as a singer-songwriter. If you've been checking out my recordings over the time since I've been on MySpace (I first got on here around May 2006), you've no doubt heard some of the songs that are currently planned for my album. For example, on my current MySpace profile, "If I Could Turn the Hands of Time", "Love Holds On", and "I Can't Say Goodbye" are tentatively planned for inclusion. I've been working on this project a long time, taking brief, and sometimes not so brief, detours to put out other, smaller projects. Well, we're now getting to the point where the rubber needs to hit the road (translated into English: "I need to finish the project and get the album out the door"). See, I booked a couple of performances at this Summer's Orange County Super Fair, with the idea that I'd have CDs ready to go in time. The first of the performances will be on Sunday, July 12th, so that sets a deadline in the sand for needing to have everything ready. Crunch time!!! The thing is, I'm pretty slow on the recording front, owing in large part to my doing everything on most of my recordings. Two months to record two additional songs, get the whole project mastered, get all the admin done, and create the artwork is a very short time for me. Thus, alongside all the other stuff I've got going on, there's been a lot of time pressure, though I am making progress, and I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel (English translation: "I think I might actually be able to get it done in time"). Anyway, if you don't see much of me around here in the next couple of months, you've got a good idea where I'll be and what I'll be up to. Hopefully I can come up for air around mid-July. Until then...
Powered by | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|
|
Friday, November 07, 2008
|
Category: Music
Back on August 4, 2007, in my "Summer Happenings" blog, I wrote:
Speaking of the other side of the world, I've been collaborating with a Russian songwriter and producer, whose name is Alexei Ustinov, on a new song and recording to be released sometime later this year. Alexei is producing the instrumental tracks over in Russia, with production just now getting underway. Once the tracks are ready, I'll be recording the vocals as a duet with a female singer, whose identity shall remain a mystery for the time being, here in SoCal. This project will be a first for me on a number of fronts. In addition to its being my longest distance collaboration to date, it is the first time someone else will be producing one of my recordings, and it will be my first ever duet recording.
I added the emphasis here in the spirit of "even the best of intentions..." That's right, "sometime later this year" (i.e. 2007) ended up turning into mid-September 2008, but the song I'd been talking about, "Make Me Feel", has finally made it out into the world (and most of your favorite digital download stores). That being the case, I figured it was finally time to let you know a bit more about this project, including the name of the "mystery singer" and why the project took so darn long to finish. Let's start back at the beginning of the story.
I first "met" (i.e. in a cyberspace sense) Alexei Ustinov back in 2004 through my efforts as a music software reviewer at CakewalkNet. I was reviewing one of his company's products (JMT Orchestrator), as well as another product for which his company had some value-added technology. The latter product was based on some vocal synthesis technology from Yamaha called Vocaloid. It turned out that, not only had Alexei's company developed some software that added expressiveness on top of the commercial Vocaloid-based products like the one I was reviewing (Zero-G's MIRIAM Virtual Vocalist), but he also was undertaking an effort to record an entire album with a Vocaloid singer. Over time, we traded some recordings and shared some comments on those recordings. To make a long story short, we resolved to try to work together on some kind of project at some point when we both could find the time, but that notion sat on the shelf for awhile.
Cut to early March of 2007, and Alexei approached me about writing some English language lyrics to one of his Russian songs. The song was a duet, and one special consideration was that the first use of the English version of the song would be to demonstrate some second generation Vocaloid-based singers from a Swedish company called PowerFX. I really liked the melody for the song, and the notion of writing a song for robot singers gave me a lyrical idea to help get me started. That led to the first half of the first verse lyrics:
Oh, your hands are as cold as steel
And your glare could make fire freeze over
Any heart that you once revealed
Hides like April in late October
I also wrote an initial draft of what eventually turned out to be the first half of the second verse lyrics (though I'd initially written that section as the first half of the first verse), and also the final chorus lyric in that one sitting, then ran the idea by Alexei. He approved.
At that point, I wasn't really clear where to go with a second verse, but then I had the "bright idea" that it might be funny, in a "humorous video" sort of way, to think of the duet as being between a male human and a female robot. The words would have to be something a real man and woman could sing to each other, and should have a ring of truth from real relationships, but then there would be a sight gag due to extra meanings in the words if the female happened to be a robot. That led to what eventually became the second half of the first verse, which would be sung by the female:
Once you only had eyes for me
Made me feel like your gift from heaven
Oh, but lately we barely speak
Or we rage just like Armageddon
The chorus picked up from there with:
Darling, show me what's on your mind
What's in your heart
What do your eyes conceal
Maybe we could cry in the night
Laugh 'til it's light
Darling, just make me feel
Give me just a glimpse of your heart
Tear me apart
Show me that you're still real
Maybe we could scream, hug, and shout
Work it all out
Darling, just make me feel
The basic ideas was the notion that we guys like new toys, and "play with them" quite a bit when we first get them. Then, over time, the interest wanes as things get more routine, and ultimately the toy sits on the shelf, maybe getting occasional use if it hasn't been replaced altogether. If the toy were personified, though, as with the female robot, that toy might be crying out for attention. Do we guys treat real life relationships like that? I'm guessing there might be a bunch of women who might make that case.
Most of the initial lyric came together within the space of a few days back in April 2007. By late May, the robot singers' version was up on the web, sung by PowerFX' Big Al and Sweet Ann. The lyrics got rearranged, and saw other minor tweaks after that, but the song was, by and large, complete.
Meanwhile, Alexei and I began considering what was going to be my duet with a female Vocaloid. He supplied some basic tracks, and I put together an initial demo with MIRIAM, the Vocaloid I'd reviewed for CakewalkNet. I used that to solicit some feedback on the song. While the song got pretty positive feedback, I think the notion of a male human dueting with a female robot just confused most. Also, in these days of overly AutoTuned vocals, someone wouldn't necessarily pick up on the notion the female singer was a robot without the video, which neither Alexei nor I had the animation talents and time to make.
In parallel, Alexei had begun considering the idea of making a much more polished recording of the song, using real Russian studio musicians. When he proposed that, with the idea that I'd sing the male part, I proposed the idea of using a real female singer. Since this was to be a song about a mature relationship, I wanted to involve a singer with a mature voice. If I had a mental model based on well-known singers, it might be something on the order of a Sting/Bonnie Raitt duet. (Hey, Sting and Bonnie, if you're out there reading this, it's not too late!) While most of the female singers I knew locally had young voices, I immediately hit on an idea for the part.
Beverly Bremers and I met something like a decade ago. We were in a very short-lived (one show) band together. While I had not been aware of her prior to that experience, Beverly had a big hit on the pop charts back in 1972 with "Don't Say You Don't Remember", had appeared on Broadway (including in the original cast of "Hair"), and had co-written that classic of the Disney aerobics set, "Mousercise". While our mutual band didn't work out, we had worked together a few times after that, including co-writing a pair of songs back in the late 1990s, for which Beverly sang the demos. I thought her voice would be perfect for the song, and, luckily, she agreed to do it. This was in early June of 2007.
Beverly is one of the busiest people I've ever met. In addition to teaching vocal technique, songwriting, and voiceover classes, she is still very active as an actress, both on stage and on television, voiceover talent, and session vocalist. While this is great for her, it also meant it could be challenging trying to get together with her between an already hectic schedule and the inevitable last minute changes when, for example, an audition required her to be in Los Angeles ASAP. A month passed between the time Beverly agreed to do the project and the time we finally succeeded in getting together to set the key for the song to make sure it suited both of our voices. We did get together in early July 2007, though, then Alexei and I started going back and forth on the instrumental arrangements. By the end of July, we'd agreed on the basic arrangement, and Alexei began involving Anton Ilyashenko, of MegaTon Studio in Novosibirsk, Russia in coordinating and engineering the recording. This was just before I'd written the above-referenced blog with its overly optimistic prediction on how long it would take to get the recording out the door.
Besides engineering the recording, Anton also played bass guitar on it. Other musicians involved included Andrey Galuskho (drums), Andrey Orlov (guitars), and Nikolai Panchenko (saxophone). Much later, I also overdubbed some keyboard parts, but, unfortunately, did not get to travel to Russia to do that, rather recording my parts in my home studio here in Orange County, California. Most of the instrumental parts were completed in August and September, though some delays after the initial parts were tracked got us to late November before an instrumental mix with most of the parts was available, then to mid-December for some revisions to be ready to begin the vocal work here in California.
By that time, the holidays, more scheduling challenges, and a sore throat ended up delaying tracking vocals until late February 2008. In the mean time, I'd gotten another idea. Since Beverly and I would be doing the one duet as a single, maybe it would be worth considering adding a second song, sort of like the old A-side/B-side 45 RPM vinyl singles of yore. I thought one of the songs we'd written together back in the late 90s, "Unsaid", would work as a duet, so I ran the idea by Beverly at our vocal tracking session. She agreed. I already had tracks for this, originally designed for another project, then tweaked to fit Beverly's key (which I already knew from the demo of the song), so we just tracked Beverly's lead vocal for the extra song at the end of our session for "Make Me Feel". We'd have her come back later to do background vocals, after I'd tracked my vocals and my own background vocals.
The initial idea was to mix "Make Me Feel" in Russia, so, after choosing the bits and pieces of our raw vocals that would make the final cut, then getting those all put together, they were shipped back to Alexei and Anton in early March for the mix. Later in March, we had an initial mix, but Alexei decided he wanted to replace the drums, so new tracking was scheduled, and the results became available in mid-to-late April.
Meanwhile, I'd begun working on the "Unsaid" recording, getting Beverly's lead vocal, as well as my lead and background vocals, finished around mid-April, then scheduling tracking of Beverly's background vocals for early May. I'd also passed an early rough mix of the song by Alexei, more or less as an "FYI" since we'd be coupling the final recording of that with the final recording of "Make Me Feel" for the ultimate release. Alexei asked me if he could get the lead vocal tracks for it as he wanted to try an experiment. By late April, he'd provided a possible alternate arrangement of the song
When Beverly and I got together in early May, besides tracking her background vocals for "Unsaid", we reviewed the latest mixes from Alexei and Anton for "Make Me Feel". This is the point where the idea of my adding keyboard parts arose, and where we also started to change strategies on how we would attack the final mix, with parts being mixed in Russia by Anton and other parts being mixed here by yours truly. We all went back and forth over the course of a few weeks -- I was also interspersing background vocal work on "Unsaid" with this -- and we had a close-to-final mix of "Make Me Feel" in late May.
Right around the same time, Alexei delivered his first mix of his alternate arrangement of "Unsaid". Beverly and I both listened to it, and, though we liked some aspects of it quite a lot, there were other parts of it that just didn't feel right to be the main representation of the song. I've since come to affectionately refer to that version as the "Leningrad Cowboys Russian Stadium Mix" because of the larger than life feel of both its arrangement and its processing. Our dilemma was that it was an interesting version of the song, just not the one we wanted to be the main representation of the song to the outside world. I came up with the idea of seeing if Alexei would be interested in letting us use that as a branded remix of the song, and he agreed. His production company is called Virartech, so we now refer to the final version of that mix as the Virartech Remix.
Now there was another dilemma, though. It would seem unbalanced to have a 3-track "single" with two versions of one song and one version of the other. Remembering back to the early robot demos of "Make Me Feel", one of which had an electronic club style, I approached Alexei about the possibility of doing a club remix of that song. He agreed. This was still in late May. Alexei had an initial club mix to check out in early June, and most all of June was spent working on, and going back and forth with comments, both from those on the project team and from several outside parties, on the various mixes of all the tracks. Those had now expanded to a total of 5 -- besides the club mix of "Make Me Feel", there would also be a radio edit of that mix.
By the time we had final mixes of all the tracks together, we were into early July, and I began work on the mastering. That was finished by mid-July, and it was on to working on the packaging and administrative sides of getting a release out the door. I won't bore you with the details on all that. Suffice it to say that, between doing the actual work on those aspects, coordinating responses, and coordinating schedules for a few in-person meetings between Beverly and me, it took another couple of months before the product was finally ready to go out the door in mid-September. Let me just say I'm glad there were no major labels involved to slow down the project!
 Beyond that point, there was still some more waiting, for the various digital download stores to take the product live. However, most are indeed live now (GroupieTunes and Rhapsody are two notable exceptions as of this writing), including mainstream stores like iTunes, and AmazonMP3, and Lala, as well as more indie-oriented stores like eMusic and Amie Street. Here's the final track list from the project:
1. Make Me Feel
2. Unsaid
3. Make Me Feel (Virartech Radio Mix)
4. Unsaid (Virartech Remix)
5. Make Me Feel (Virartech Club Mix)
It's been a long time coming, but I hope you'll enjoy the results.
Powered by | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|
|
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
|
Current mood:  excited
Category: Music
A big part of my early musical development was influenced by hymns and other church music. Somewhere around seven years of age, after having taken piano lessons from my mother since the age of four, I started teaching myself to play songs I heard in the new folk masses at the Catholic church my family attended regularly. My first paying job, in the fourth grade, was as a boy soprano in an all-male choir at an Episcopal church in downtown Schenectady's stockade section. We wore traditional English-style choir robes and sang traditional hymns. A bit later, somewhere around junior high or early high school, I got hired to play organ at a mass a week back at my own church, and became familiar with even more of the traditional hymns.
When we're talking about traditional hymns, we're generally talking about songs that have stood the test of time. For example, "Nearer, My God, to Thee" had its initial words written back in 1841, and its original music composed in 1856. The words for "Holy, Holy, Holy" date even earlier, back to 1826, and the music was composed in 1861. "Onward, Christian Soldiers" is a bit newer, with words written in 1864 and music composed in 1871. The words for "Amazing Grace" date back to Revolutionary War times, 1779, though the music wasn't composed until 1831. We're talking songs that have survived 150-200 years in many cases! I can only hope some of my songs will be around that long into the future.
Being a fan of many traditional hymns, I've often considered the notion of recording an album of my favorite hymns with modern arrangements. I'm pretty slow on the production front, though, not to mention perennially behind in recording even my own original songs. Thus, the notion has never gotten off the ground, and just remained one of those things on my list of things to do ... "someday".
Early last year, though, I heard that an LA-based independent record label, Goodnight Kiss Records, was looking for creative covers of traditional hymns. This was going to be for a multi-artist album, so I could try just doing one and leave it to other artists to fill out the album. At the very least, I'd end up trying out some of my ideas on modernizing one of my favorite hymns, and end up with a recording of that. Maybe if things went well, though, I might even make the cut and get the recording out to the world at some level.
One catch was that I was in the middle of some deadlines at the time. By the time I got around to being ready to actually try doing something, time was getting very short -- less than a week. For perspective, I often take up to a month to get a full production done. I also didn't know what hymn I'd pick, because there were so many I liked. I initially whittled my big list down to four possibilities. From memory, I think they were "Crown Him With Many Crowns", "Holy, Holy, Holy", "The Church's One Foundation", and "Onward, Christian Soldiers". Decisions, decisions...
It came down to deadline pressure, and that the first hymn on my shortlist that gave me an arrangement idea I felt was fresh enough was "Onward, Christian Soldiers". At the time, I was hearing the Arctic Monkeys' breakthrough hit, "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor" all the time, and I was, more or less, envisioning someone with a voice and attitude like that being something like a modern Salvation Army recruiter. To be quite frank, I'm a pretty bad imitator. (I tell people that's what makes me an original.) Thus, I don't think it came out anything like an Arctic Monkeys song, but, if it sounds a bit different from some of my usual fare, you've got an idea why. Putting in some all nighters, I did get the initial recording of the song finished by the original deadline. Thankfully, that deadline also got extended, which allowed me to refine the recording a bit more after my initial submission.
To make a long story short, I heard fairly quickly that my recording was on the short list for the album. After that, much time passed waiting for additional submissions to fill out the album, waiting for final decisions, waiting for contracts, waiting for mastering, graphics, manufacturing, and all the other stuff that goes into producing a quality album of this sort. I'm happy to report, though, that the album is finally here, and the wait was most definitely worth it.
 The album is called ALTARnative Music: Songs of Christian Faith, and you can listen to 2-minute clips of all twelve songs on the album, and purchase CD or MP3 downloads of the album at CD Baby. It is also already available at iTunes, but the song clips there are only 30 seconds apiece, so I recommend checking it out at CD Baby. The full list of songs and performers is as follows:
1. Nearer My God To Thee - Nine Stick
2. Jesus Loves Me - Johnny English
3. Just As I Am - Peter Ivanovich Sahaidachny
4. Holy, Holy, Holy - Heather and Andie Duncan
5. Were You There - Joe Uveges
6. Rock Of Ages - Kimberly McManus
7. Blessed Assurance - Breath To Bones
8. This Little Light - Jaye Walker
9. How Great Thou Art - Cathy Kent
10. Onward Christian Soldiers - Rick Paul
11. Amazing Grace- Shay Dillon
12. Somebody Up There - Vaughan Ray Daniel
If you've only got time to check out a few tracks after you've checked out mine (hint, hint), I might recommend Nine Stick's version of "Nearer My God to Thee" and Joe Uveges' "Were You There" as starting points. These are a couple of my personal favorites after my first four or five listens to the CD. (If you're getting the idea I really like this CD, feel free to give yourself a pat on the back for your amazing powers of observation.) However, I heartily recommend listening to the whole thing, as every track is solid, and there are a lot of great singers on this album, too.
If you do check it out, please let me know what you think. If you like it, perhaps you could also pass the word on to any others you think might enjoy it.
Powered by | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|
|
Monday, November 05, 2007
|
Category: Music
I just wanted to let you guys know about a new development that I'm excited about. Maybe this fits in the category of "cheap thrills", but here goes:
All the recordings I've released to date are now available in Amazon.com's new MP3 store. Those recordings include:
Mind you, these recordings have been available in a number of digital download stores for awhile. Those include iTunes, eMusic, Napster, and Rhapsody, among others. On-demand CDs and music lead sheets are also available at Lulu.com. So why am I excited about this one?
Before I answer that, I should provide a little perspective. Currently, iTunes is the biggest digital download store going, and it has certainly been the most popular one for purchasing my recordings, as well, accounting for over four times the volume of its nearest competitor. Many digital download stores have come and gone, or hung around at the margins, without coming close to iTunes' success. While I think part of this is due to the relative seamlessness of the iTunes software and store, I believe the biggest reason, by far, for this success is the dominance of iPods as portable players for digitally downloaded music. Most of the other digital download stores to date have had various forms of DRM (Digital Rights Management), enforced by the recording industry to protect their wares, which were incompatible with the iPod. Oh, you could play the various downloads on various specific MP3 players. However, if you wanted to play them on your iPod, you either had to jump through hoops (e.g. burn the files to CD then rip them into iTunes), or you had to buy them from iTunes in the first place.
On the other side of the coin, if you had an MP3 player other than an iPod, you couldn't use the iTunes store to get downloads for your player without jumping through hoops. The iTunes format had its own form of DRM that only played with iPods. iTunes has since come up with a DRM-free format and higher quality recordings, but the format is still not a common one that will work with most other MP3 players, and not all recordings are available in this format anyway. (I think all mine will be eventually, but, as of the moment, only "Bubble Gum" is available in the higher fidelity, DRM-free format. I have no clue how iTunes determines which recordings get into the new format at any particular point in time.) Also, the companies servicing this market have been somewhat in flux. For example, Sony's CONNECT service recently announced it would be closing down sometime in the not-too-distant future.
Amazon's late entry into this market might seem to put them at a significant disadvantage. On the other hand, their having waited for the market to shake out a bit, while observing what has and hasn't worked for others, puts them in a better position to learn from others' mistakes. Furthermore, now that much of the recording industry has come around to DRM-free downloads, Amazon enters the market at a point where they can service users of all MP3 players, including iPods.
Of course, Amazon's already being a trusted on-line retailer is a big plus. It's not only that you can feel relatively safe that they'll be around for awhile, or that you've probably already given them your credit card information. That is part of it, but the other part of it is that, if you like, you can buy real CDs, computers, digital camcorders, MP3 players, beauty products, and digital downloads all in the same on-line shopping trip. It's kind of like making a virtual trip to Target or Wal-Mart, only without having to endure the long checkout lines, especially this time of year. Only it's better, because you can find pretty much everything there, not just the most popular products that justify taking up shelf space in stores across the country.
All those aspects add up to making Amazon perhaps the first digital download store that has a chance to challenge iTunes. That is part of why I'm excited about their MP3 download store, but there's another reason, too. At least as of the moment, short of purchasing the on-demand CD versions of my releases, which provide full CD quality, the Amazon.com offerings represent the highest fidelity, most hassle-free versions of these recordings. They are 256 kbps, DRM-free MP3 files, which you can play on any MP3 player, play on your computer using software you certainly already have (be it Windows Media Player, Winamp, iTunes, or whatever), burn to CD, and do anything else you might do with regular MP3 files. I might add that Amazon supports multiple pricing levels. Whereas most digital download stores charge a flat 99 cents per track, Amazon has multiple pricing tiers, and many recordings (including all of mine), are available for 89 cents a track. (The pricing tier used is a choice made by the record companies or independent artists who own rights to the recordings.)
I also think that, if you're already comfortable with Amazon.com in general, as I am, the shopping experience may even be a bit friendlier than iTunes. For example, maybe I'm just missing something with iTunes, but I've always found it to be inconvenient to play the 30-second preview song clips for multiple songs from an album. It seems like it only plays one song at a time, and sometimes pressing what I think should play another song's clip just replays the song I'd just played. With Amazon, though, you can even preview all songs on an album, or all songs across all albums from a single artist, in one go. Thus, Amazon's MP3 store has recently become my favorite place to audition short bits of albums quickly, whether I'm just curious or even thinking about buying the CD.
Only time will tell how Amazon does in this new market, both in terms of comparison to iTunes and the others and in terms of sales for independent bands and artists like me. At the moment, though, I'm really jazzed about this new option. I think it likely provides the best value going at the moment, while also providing access to a very wide selection of music, from both major labels and independent artists, and a comfortable on-line shopping experience. Don't take my word for it, though. Check it out, and see what you think. I'd be very interested in hearing others' impressions, whether you've bought a zillion dowloads through iTunes or one of the other stores already, or you're a total newbie to the idea of digital downloads. (For the record, I still prefer real CDs, and have never been into portable players, be it iPods, Walkmans, or whatever.)
Powered by | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|
|
Thursday, November 01, 2007
|
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes
No, there is no connection to Seinfeld and the notion of "a show about nothing" implied by my blog title. It's just that I'm starting out writing not having the slightest clue what I'm going to write, or even what topics I might address. I just feel a bit guilty for not having written a blog in something like four months. I'd originally hoped to be writing on the order of once every week or two, or at least once a month, then it got to more like once a quarter year, and now it's even past that.
It's not even that I don't have anything to say. I've probably written enough words since my last blog to more than fill daily blogs, or even come up with a few books' worth of material, if that is, they were on any single subject or set of topics that related to one another somehow. Some probably were, but most were just reactive responses to questions someone posed, be it via personal e-mail or messaging or on a public or semi-public group. Then some were responses to statements someone made, where I just felt I had to speak up with another point of view however similar or dissimilar it might be to the original post.
Somehow, though, writing a blog always seems to feel a lot more daunting. It feels like it should be about me, or at least my first-hand experiences, yet it should also be related in a way that would be interesting to others.
I'm just not all that interesting, and my day-to-day activities just aren't all that exciting most of the time. I mean I get up, make breakfast, do breakfast dishes, fire up the computer, and sit in front of a screen most all day. I occasionally get up to move to a musical keyboard (as opposed to a computer keyboard) or microphone, or just to go get a drink of water or whatever. At some point I've got to cut out to make dinner for my family. After that, they've pretty much got their own stuff to do. Thus, after playing some piano and singing for awhile, both because I enjoy it and to keep my chops in shape, I generally catch a short nap to catch up on some needed sleep. Then I'm usually back at the computer until the wee hours of the morning. Isn't this paragraph making you yawn?
The largest percentage of my workday is spent working on recordings. They tend to take me forever since I'm doing everything myself. Occasionally I also get to write new songs, which, of course, adds to my backlog of songs needing to be recorded. Oh yeah, then there's a lot of time spent at e-mail, mostly discussing the music business, songwriting craft, or music production technology (I also write music technology reviews for an e-zine a few times a year). There's also the research side of trying to figure out what I need to do to take care of business and other administrative dealings in the rapidly changing world of the modern music business.
When people ask me what I do, I generally say I'm a songwriter. Honestly, though, it often feels like I spend only a small minority of my time writing songs. The vast majority of my time goes toward doing all the ancillary things that are involved in trying to get those songs out into the world and to figure out how to try and eke out a living in this industry. I've had some success in the former, but not much in the latter.
Speaking of getting my songs out into the world, my ideas of what that means have, perhaps necessarily, changed over the years I've been doing this. When I started out writing songs, back in high school or junior high (if you don't count that one-off three-line song I wrote in the fifth grade -- "I really like to fish/And have a little wish/I wish I'd catch a fish"), it was mainly because I had visions of becoming the next Elton John. I figured I'd need some original songs to do that. There really wasn't any question of how I'd get my songs out in the world. I'd be recording them, selling millions of records and cassettes (yeah, I know, I'm dating myself -- at least I didn't say 8-tracks, though that might have been the operative format when I started writing), and touring the world performing to large audiences.
I have to admit that idea still appeals to me, albeit probably replacing "records and cassettes" with "CDs and digital downloads". Nevertheless, somewhere in my late twenties or early thirties -- I'm 47 now -- I figured the odds of my making a living that way, in a music industry that was heavily focused on youth and visual image, were decreasing rapidly and getting to the point of near extinction. I shifted my focus to the notion of my songs' getting out into the world through other people who could take them a lot farther than I could. It wasn't until I got on the web, in the mid-to-late 1990's, though, that that notion started to bear some fruit. Since then, my songs have literally been all over the world, recorded by artists as far away as Norway and Mongolia. Still, the notion of those songs' actually working their way into any sort of public consciousness has remained elusive. The closest I've come thus far is having one song go top five for both radio and video airplay in Mongolia, a country of less than three million people, via a budding young pop star over there named Nominjin. I'd had a few single song publishing deals out in Nashville that I'd hoped would lead to cuts with big name artist here in the USA. While my songs did get pitched to some of the biggest names in Nashville, as well as some up-and-comers, in the end, nothing came from those deals.
What really struck me at that point was how dependent I was on other people, sometimes multiple layers of other people, for getting my songs out there. That's not a bad thing in and of itself, but in a music business that is increasingly dominated by financial interests, with the music taking a back seat, the decisions at each layer of possible acceptance or rejection increasingly become less about the music and more about vested interests. It's not even a case of, "all things being equal, we'll go with the one we've got money invested in." Rather, it's more like, "unless there is a massively compelling reason to do otherwise, we'll go with the one we've got money invested in, then the one with at track record, then one from whom we need brownie points, then the one recommended by someone we know personally, then..." I know I am risking sounding like sour grapes, or like I'm making excuses. However, I suspect anyone who's worked in big corporate environment, be it in the music industry or otherwise, will probably understand how this can happen. And anyone who's listened to commercial radio in the last decade has an idea of the results.
I might add that it's not all that different in the independent music world when you're relying on other singers to get your songs out there. Some of the political pressures go away, and there generally aren't many layers -- often I'd be dealing directly with the artist or one of his or her parents. Of course, there is very little money in that market, and the great hope is to find someone with great potential early and develop a relationship that can provide for future opportunities if that artist makes it big. In that world, the dependencies are different. First off, only a minority of the artists truly has the level of talent that could take them very far. I have heard some artist demos of my songs that have made me absolutely cringe -- think an order of magnitude worse than William Hung. Then again, there are some immensely talented ones, too. (I'm still not parting with the early 1999 demo cassette I received featuring a then high school-aged, but already immensely talented, singer from Oklahoma named Carrie Underwood!) The second barrier in that arena tends to be change. It seems that most of the artists looking for songs are young, typically in their teens or early twenties, though occasionally there are some older ones, too. Things start out with the artist going gung ho, then some major life event happens, such as graduating high school, getting married, becoming a parent, having family or health issues, etc. All of a sudden, the music takes a back seat. This is probably as it should be in most cases, but this doesn't change the fact that all the time you've spent on something is dependent on someone else whose priorities have changed. Those artists who get past the first two barriers are generally the ones who truly have talent. The next barrier tends to be when they start writing their own songs, and decide they will be doing those exclusively from that point. Or, alternately, they get other, better-funded individuals or companies interested in helping them out, and vested interests enter the picture again. At this point it becomes much like the major label artist scenario (if it isn't literally one of those scenarios).
Wow, I think I've been whining! They whined a lot in Seinfeld, too. Hmm....
Anyway, while I've never really giving up on the notion of other people recording my songs, over the past year or two I have also begun trying to begin getting my songs out into the world in ways over which I have more direct control. Besides performing a little more regularly, I've put a few of my own recordings out there via iTunes and other e-tailers. (Besides just the downloadable recordings, there are also on-demand CDs, downloadable lead sheets, and now even ringtones available -- see my web store for the latest list of products and stores. Hey, Seinfeld had commercials, too!) I'm not exactly setting the charts on fire, but each month my music gets into the hands of a few more people. Every once in awhile I'll hear of how one of my songs and recordings has played a part in someone's life, from being played in a church just before a couple's wedding vows to being used to underscore a milestone in a man's AA program progress. When I think that those people could have much more easily chosen a song from any number of artists other people had actually heard of, those moments become all the more satisfying. Of course, that also begs the question as to how they heard of me, or at least how they stumbled on my music and decided to give it a chance despite never having heard of me.
Lately I've been working on a full-length album. If you've been checking out the songs I load on my MySpace profile, you've already heard a few songs that are at least good candidates for the album. Which specific songs end up on the album and when the album will be released are still to be determined, but I'm shooting for a total of twelve songs, and my best guess at a release date is sometime during the first quarter of 2008. How long it takes me to finish the recordings is the biggest near term bottleneck, then I'll have to deal with licensing considerations for co-written songs once I've got the list narrowed down.
Another area I'm hoping to target in the not-too-distant future is getting my songs into movies, television shows, and other multimedia works. The main bottleneck there is also getting recordings done, so getting the album recordings finished is more or less a prerequisite.
While my performances have been limited to Southern California for quite awhile now, I've at least been starting to think about the notion of trying to get out a bit further afield. I love traveling, and the notion of combining that with performing for live audiences (another of my favorite things), has always felt a bit like the Holy Grail to me. Of course, the obvious challenge is trying to find a way to do that practically since people don't generally come out to hear singer-songwriters they've never heard of. It seems like the few who have heard of me, and like my music enough to go to a live show, are fairly well dispersed around the USA and overseas. Who knows, though? Maybe there are people who'd like to see me perform in their town that I just don't know about? Just to get an idea, I've just added a "Demand It" control, from Eventful.com, to my MySpace profile page and the Gigs page on my main web site. I figure if there are enough demands between now and Summer 2008 to do some kind of house concert, coffeehouse, or stadium tour -- hey, I can dream, can't I! -- I'm game.
In the interim, for anyone who's in Southern California, I do have a show coming up in late November. I'll be adding some Christmas songs, including all the songs from my 4-song Christmas EP, That Time of Year (hint: you can "gift it" at iTunes or get on-demand CD versions from Lulu -- oops, another commercial message from our sponsor), to my normal fare for that show. I'll probably be adding another date or two in early December, but I'm still waiting for confirmation of any additional dates at this point. My show list on MySpace is always up-to-date, though, so stop back anytime for the latest list.
Okay, well, I guess I've made enough ado about nothing. I hope you've enjoyed the rambles.
Powered by | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|
|
Sunday, August 05, 2007
|
Category: Music
While it might not technically be correct to call the first of August the halfway mark for Summer, it always feels like it is. We won't be taking a vacation this year since my wife is in an intensive MBA course that considers September to be the right month for a break. Of course the kids are back in school by then. Well, maybe we'll get to one of the local beaches before the season ends. After all, we're only about 10 miles inland from Laguna Beach.
Meanwhile, I've been taking advantage of the summer non-break to continue doing what I can to create new music and get that music out into the world. Here are a few recent and upcoming highlights.
My latest single, "Bubble Gum", is finally available on iTunes and various other digital download stores (CONNECT, eMusic, iTunes, Lulu, Music.com, Napster, Rhapsody). For anyone who likes to sing karaoke, you can also get karaoke tracks, with and without background vocals, at many of the download stores. An on-demand CD version and downloadable lead sheet (in PDF format) are also available at Lulu, while a ringtone is now available at Music.com. The recording is a remix of an earlier version my longtime MySpace friends may remember. (If you'd like to listen, for free, to the full-length recording, I recommend checking out either the Napster or Rhapsody link above.) I decided to put it out as a single, partly because it is very different from most of my material, so wouldn't fit any of the album concepts I have in mind, and partly to coincide with an upcoming, highly fun use of the song. I hope you won't mind if I leave the latter as a surprise for a little while longer. Let's just say it involves a flying pig on the other side of the world.
Speaking of the other side of the world, I've been collaborating with a Russian songwriter and producer, whose name is Alexei Ustinov, on a new song and recording to be released sometime later this year. Alexei is producing the instrumental tracks over in Russia, with production just now getting underway. Once the tracks are ready, I'll be recording the vocals as a duet with a female singer, whose identity shall remain a mystery for the time being, here in SoCal. This project will be a first for me on a number of fronts. In addition to its being my longest distance collaboration to date, it is the first time someone else will be producing one of my recordings, and it will be my first ever duet recording. It has already been another first for me, though. It is the first time one of my songs has been recorded, as a duet no less, by two "robot" (actually software-based) singers. The song is called "Make Me Feel", and you can hear the new Vocaloid virtual singers, Big Al and Sweet Ann, perform a clip of an earlier draft of the song at www.jasminemusic.com/vocaloid/05-28-2007.htm. (I think you'll get a kick out of Big Al. I'm thinking he shouldn't give up his day job, though.)
Thanks to a challenge from our local Just Plain Folks chapter, which involved writing songs to two predetermined titles, I've written two brand new songs ("Wishing You Well" and "The Last Good Day") in the last month and a half. Adding these to the other songs I've written in 2007 is making 2007 a more prolific year than I've had in awhile, and adding to my backlog of songs to be recorded. I'm afraid my non-local friends will have to wait awhile to hear the new songs, which are my first solo writes in quite awhile. For you Orange County locals, though, I've already started playing both songs in my live shows. I plan to play "The Last Good Day" again this Saturday at the Neighborhood Cup, and will play both songs in my full-length Borders shows later this month (August 24th at the new Tustin store and August 25th at Costa Mesa/Newport). See the Upcoming Shows section of my profile page for details.
I'm currently working on recording a song Mike Parker and I wrote a couple of years back called "Take Advantage of Me". You can hear the latest working mix on my profile page (it's currently the top song). In the tradition of country drinking/cheating songs, this is a drinking/cheating song. However, there's a twist. I won't spoil the surprise, though. You'll just have to listen if you want to find out what makes it a decidedly non-traditional cheating song. It'll probably take another week or two to finish the recording, and I'll update my profile with the final recording when it's done.
Man, I'm tired just rereading this (it's being about half past one in the morning may be coming into play, too), so I'd better quit and get some sleep. Have a great second half of the summer!
Powered by | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|
|
Sunday, July 01, 2007
|
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes
If you blinked, you may not have noticed, but the first half of 2007 has come and gone. Or maybe it's dragged on for you like it might never be over. Or maybe you're thinking, "huh? Why is this guy talking about half years? Who cares?"
To be honest, I suppose there's nothing all that special about half years. However, we tend to start out new years with grandiose plans of all we're going to try and accomplish. Sometimes those plans are realistic, and sometimes they aren't. Often, though, we lose sight of them after awhile, or get pulled off on tangents, and the year winds its way down, and we're not much nearer to where we'd hoped to be at the end of the year than we were at the beginning. That is where half years come in handy.
The half-year break just seems like a convenient time to sit back and take a look at the goals you had at the beginning of the year, and how far you've come in your quest to reach them. Or maybe it might be a time to reassess those goals, and whether they are still relevant to your life today. Maybe there were developments along the way that have given you a new sense of perspective or purpose. Perhaps continuing to pursue the goals you had at the beginning of the year would only represent stubbornly doing something just because you said you would, rather than because it is still worth doing.
I can tell you the past half-year has turned out a whole lot different than I'd been hoping or expecting. While I always tend to have many more things I'd like to do than I have time in the day/week/month, there was one very specific goal I had at the outset. It was something I'd hoped to have gotten to a significant milestone on by the end of March, but which I have yet to do. Oh, I've done some of the supporting work en route to that milestone, and the way I've approached some of that work may actually make what I deliver better than it would have been had I focused more closely on the specific goal. I've also gotten distracted by some other projects, though. Some got me nowhere, and others still look like they might hold some promise somewhere down the line. Nothing's ever a sure thing in this songwriting business, so "looking like they might hold some promise" is at least mildly reassuring.
I've also written more new songs already this year than I wrote in the past couple of years combined. If you've been following my bulletins and blogs, you've already heard two of those ("Elizabeth, Lately" and "Spam It"). While writing and recording those might have been "distractions" in the sense of working on the specific goal I'd had in mind, writing new songs is part and parcel of what I do, and what I need to do, as a songwriter. Without the songs, all the business-oriented goals in the world wouldn't mean much.
I look at years and goals as being a bit like long distance trips. You can try and plan out the exact route to get you from here to where you want to end up, but it's unlikely you'll have a great trip if you stick too rigidly to your plan. Perhaps the freeway is tied up in one place, and a detour through the mountains might be a nice breath of fresh air (probably literally in this case), or the motel you'd hoped to stay in is closed, so you'll need to try somewhere else, maybe even in another city. Or maybe there's bad weather in the Texas panhandle, so it might be time to try the northern route instead. Heck, did you even want to end up in New York City in the first place? Maybe Maine might be nicer?
Okay, I profess to being one of those types who tends toward meticulously planning trips, often months in advance, and down to the turns to get to the motels where I've made guaranteed reservations. It tends to bug me when things don't work out, be it because something closed unexpectedly, the motel I'd booked is really a rat hole, or I get tied up in traffic for a bunch of hours and don't have time to do everything I'd wanted to do. Sometimes, though, you just have to roll with the flow. As long as you're heading in the right direction, does the route you're taking matter all that much, especially if you make the most of the experiences you have en route? Sometimes the best experiences end up coming from detours.
At some point, though, you do have to take stock of your direction, and readjust for your new course. Better to do that somewhere en route than to wait until the end of the trip and find out either you've arrived at the wrong destination or the destination just isn't as attractive to you at this point as it was when you started. It just seems to me that, if we're talking about years and goals, the half-year point is as good a place as any.
So, happy new half-year, and happy journeys en route to wherever your end-of-the-year destination may be!
Powered by | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|
|
Friday, March 02, 2007
|
Category: Music
Wow, can it already be March? It's hard to believe we're already in the third month of 2007. Honestly, I'm not sure where the first two of them went.
So, will that work as my excuse for not having written a blog in the last couple of months? Oh well, at least I tried...
Anyway, since I haven't written in a long time, and don't actually have anything significant to say at this point in time anyway -- unless you happen to ask me a question on some subject I'm passionate about, in which case you might have a hard time getting me to shut up (or stop writing, whichever the case may be) -- I thought I'd at least drop a quick note to let you know what's up. Just in case anyone has actually missed my rambling, or wondered what I've been doing...
Rewinding to the end of last year, I'd been so busy for so long trying to finish the Christmas EP (That Time of Year), from the recording to the mixing, and the artwork to the paperwork, then trying to get the word out as best I could in the short time that was available between it's "official" release in late November and Christmas, that most everything else just piled up. I did manage to record a quick piano/vocal version of the traditional Christmas carol, "Away in a Manger", which I finished just before my last blog, but that got right down to the wire with the holiday week.
One of the things I'd postponed was a long overdue upgrade of my studio computer. The one I'd been using was already over five years old, which is ancient in the world of technology, and even moreso in the world of computer-based recording. Figuring out what I needed to buy and getting things ordered consumed pretty much all the time I had between the holidays, and I got my upgrade parts order in just before the end of the year. Needless to say, I spent the first part of the year backing up, deconfiguring, reconfiguring, and, of course, troubleshooting each incidence of intervention by Murphy.
The good news is I'm now happily running on an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 with 2 GB of memory, 600 GB of total disk space (of course, a lot of that is already used up with large sample libraries and such), and all the rest of the pieces that allow me to record my music and get it out into the world. The even better news is this new system absolutely screams, and that has made the recording and mixing processes much more efficient. I'm hoping this means I'll be able to get more music out the door more quickly as time goes on. If you heard "That Kiss", my featured song of last month (if you didn't, you can still hear a clip from it on the songs page on my main web site if you like), that was the first direct beneficiary of the new system. It had been sitting on my hard disk, partially produced, for a few years, mainly waiting for a block of time in between other things to finish it up. The new system helped keep the block of time it needed a lot smaller than it would have been with the old system, thus making it way more likely to get finished before being interrupted again.
Since then I've mainly been remixing some of my recordings, trying to improve the production quality in anticipation of submitting them for possible inclusion in a music library aimed at film, television, and multimedia placements. That process has been going a bit more slowly than I'd have liked, and there have been a few detours (e.g. for getting my tax return together), but hopefully I'll have an initial submission together soon, then additional ones as time goes on. There's a long lead-time for getting from the point of submission to getting songs placed and having the results available to the public, but I'm really hoping these efforts will start yielding some results beginning late this year.
In the interim, I'll be posting some of the results of my remix efforts from time to time. In fact, the new mix of "You Get What You Get" on my MySpace profile page (you can also find a slightly better quality MP3 version of it for download on my SoundClick site) is one example. That is still not a final mix at this point, so please do let me know of any feedback you might have.
These remix efforts may also do double duty with helping get some of my recordings ready for a possible album release later in the year, or perhaps for some single song releases from time to time. I'll be sure to let you know when anything new is available.
What else? Well, I did actually write a new song a few weeks ago with my friend and collaborator, Mike Parker, and I'm very excited about that. A few of you who have contacted me personally have already heard an early draft of that one. Those of you who have heard me play live last month have also heard it -- I'm also planning to play it again tomorrow afternoon (Saturday, March 3rd) at The Neighborhood Cup (see the upcoming shows listings on my profile page for more details). Once I get a recording done with the final lyrics, I'll be posting it here or on my web site. In the meantime, those of you who can't make it to tomorrow's show will just have to wait in suspense. Sorry...
Oh yeah, I've also, er, "had time" to have a multi-week bout of laryngitis. And, if you got to hear that early recording of the song I alluded to above, or heard me live last month, you, unfortunately, also got to hear that. I think I'm close to getting over that now, though.
So are we caught up now? Okay, a few last things...
First, for all of you Southern California locals, I'll be among the featured songwriters performing in the Songwriters Live writer's night at the Gypsy Lounge in Lake Forest on Thursday, March 22nd. This month, the headliner is going to be Steve Dorff (Kenny Rogers' "Through the Years", George Strait's "I Cross My Heart", Anne Murray's "I Just Fall in Love Again"). I haven't heard the full lineup yet, but two other writers I have heard will be there are my friends Anna Marie and Frank Jon Paul.
Second, I know many of my MySpace friends are also songwriters and musicians. Those of you who have your own home studios may be interested to know that I've written a number of music production software and hardware reviews, as well as a few other articles, over the past few years. The e-zine I write for is called CakewalkNet, which is aimed primarily at users of Cakewalk's SONAR recording software, and you can find all my reviews on their web site. My latest article is an interview with Noel Borthwick, Chief Technology Officer at Cakewalk, who talks about Windows Vista, the latest SONAR developments, and more. For anyone who might be interested in quickly finding articles I've written, I've also added an Articles index page on my main web site.
Last, but not least, since March is the month for St. Patrick's Day, I thought I'd feature "Portadown Rain" on my profile page this month. "Portadown Rain" is a song I wrote a number of years back with Vic Michener, from Ontario, Canada. This is one of those songs I'm really hoping to re-record in the not-too-distant future, but I hope you'll enjoy my original demo of the song in the meantime. This is one of my personal favorites, and seems to always be a favorite with my audiences, too. Anyone coming out to Songwriters Live on the 22nd just might get a chance to hear it live, too. (Hint, hint.)
Okay, I think we're caught up now.
Powered by | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|
|
Thursday, December 21, 2006
|
Category: Music
Somewhere in the next few days we'll reach that point in time where, no matter what we have in progress, those of us who celebrate Christmas will start to shut down our "life as usual" mode and switch into "Christmas celebration" mode. I know that, when I get to that point, I sometimes go quite awhile between on-line sessions. Thus, I thought I'd take the time right now to wish all my MySpace friends, and anyone else who may be reading this, a very merry Christmas, and a safe and healthy rest of the holiday season.
I didn't want to just leave it at that, though, so I'd also like to offer anyone reading this a small holiday gift, in the form of a custom recording I just finished. The song is one of my all time favorite Christmas carols, "Away in a Manger". In considering how I wanted to record it, I decided my goal would be to come as close as I could to simulating what it might be like if I were to visit you personally, playing the song for you on your own piano, assuming, of course, you had a Steinway Model D grand available... Okay, well, I didn't have one of those, either, so I used some software that gave me the next best thing, but you know it's the thought that counts, right?
Anyway, you can hear the recording on my MySpace profile page, and you can download it from there if you like. However, in checking what would happen if you did that, I discovered that MySpace converts the MP3 files I upload down to 96 kbps, which, frankly, sound kind of crappy. Thus, I've also put a free download of the same song on my SoundClick site, which allows me to put up a 128 kpbs version, and you can find the song here. I hope you will enjoy it. (Note: If you're reading this after the new year begins, I may have taken it down from my MySpace page, but I'll leave it up on SoundClick indefinitely.)
Happy holidays to everyone!
P.S. - If you haven't already checked out my 4-song Christmas EP, That Time of Year, I'd also like to invite you to have a free listen to the entire EP via Rhapsody or Napster. (Note: Napster requires you to register to listen, and you can listen to any song up to 3 times for free. Rhapsody doesn't require registration, but does require that you download their free player software.) If you find you'd really like your own permanent copy of the EP, you can find the latest list of places to get it in my web store.
Powered by | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|
|
|
City: LAKE FOREST
State: California
Country: US
|
>
|