 15 january 2000 idea to execution ----- ------- ----- (today's picture: the band ... back row, left to right: casanova, wamba; front row, left to right: selva, icedog, angel, mojo, me) -- as usual, click the image to enlarge it. Sitting in the studio ... drum machine at my feet, synth in front of me, computer on my lap, and I've gotten nothing accomplished of yet. I'm waiting for Wamba, who's busy recording one of Mojo's guitar tracks in the next room, to wire me into the mixing board so I can start piecing this composition of mine together. Looks like it might be a while ... what a helluva way to spend a Saturday night. I'm a little worried ... even though this song sounds totally cool in my head, there's no way of knowing if it'll self destruct once it exits my brain and enters the domain of sonic reality. I still have no idea what key this song is in, let alone what the chords are. It's like the pressure's on for me to write a hit, and do it quickly ... ugh. I've never even _tried_ to write a happy song before -- it always seemed so difficult to do without sounding corny, cliched, or cheesy. And now I've got one, and I need to get it from somewhere inside of me to 16 track tape within the span of a couple of hours. If anything that might pass for my new song makes it to tape tonight (a possibilty I'm doubting), the tape will be played for the band tomorrow, and with their approval, we'll start learning it and instrumentalizing it on tuesday. If it clicks, we'll play it on February 5th at 8pm at Luna Park on Robertson in West Hollywood. If our audience (and more importantly, our Corporate Backing), likes it, I'll probably be praised and asked to write yet another song.
A vicious cycle indeed. Do I _really_ want this song to work?
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Still waiting for Wamba ... now I'm compressing the audio of the other song I wrote ... trying to convince myself I know how to write, kind-of at least. If I get it down, maybe I'll upload it later with the entry, see what the journal reading world thinks of it. It'd be the first time I ever posted my voice on this site ... and everyone tells me how different my singing voice is from my speaking voice ... so it's kind of a strange representation of me to debut with. And now I'm wondering if you could even call what I possess a "singing voice." Probably not.
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Home now ... very late. I would up destroying the sound file as I compressed it. It serves me right for using freeware. Maybe I should get the band to invest in Sound Machine for me -- all I know is that I don't have the $300 to spend on it myself.
The song got written for the most part, and it doesn't sound nearly as bad as I thought it would. Wamba thinks it could be a hit ... he said he couldn't get the sing-along part out of his head. I told him that was the point. The whole thing's a bit different than what was in my head, but then again, I don't think it's possible to get exactly what was in my head out of there. I'm heading back into the studio tomorrow to finish up ... still have to work on the chords for the bridge.
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Weird ... all I'm writing about here is the band -- it's like it's the only thing going on in my life, which is about as far from the truth as ya can get. I guess music has just engulfed my soul of late, and my soul is where most of this writing comes from. As for the other 90-some-odd percent of my daily existence, well ... there's a lot of cool stuff going on there as well, and there's some not-so-cool stuff. Lordy, my writing's starting to degenerate here, so I think I'll stop. If your computer is a Mac, or can read .aif files, and if you have a lot of patience for the 2 meg download, here's a really bad camcorder audio recording of the tune I was talking about earlier. And if anyone actually bothered to listen to that, please tell me which half of the file I should chop off (beginning or end) after I compress it and try to get it down to a manageable file size. |