A Fur-Raising Update
I don’t usually want to tease too much about music I’ve finished and won’t release for a while, but since my last update was a bit of a downer, I hope you’ll excuse a little excess excitement! Since I wrote that a number of weeks ago – and to remind you I was back to having no songs finished for the new album – I’ve been working like crazy to catch back up. So the good news I want to share with you is that I have five songs finished now! You may remember previously I had four – and the cool thing is I still have one of the old ones to update, so that means I’ve finished two new ones. I feel I’m making some progress now!
The whole idea in re-visiting some of these was to improve the quality, right? You may wonder how that part of the process is going…well that’s where it gets interesting. But before I get into that, I want to share a story from way back that I was reminded of last weekend: During my pre-teen through college years, I was a huge Van Halen fan. To give you an idea, Eddie posters covered my room walls for over a decade. Anyway, I read an interview during the making of one of their albums where they were hootin’ and hollerin’ and carry on about how they were measuring how good they were doing by how the hair on their arms tingled and stood when they listened (and anyone else who’d listen). They’d call to each other “Show him your arm!” I remember thinking how cool that would be – to listen and have your body tingle in response – but as they were usually drunk and carrying on about something or other anyway, I considered it as much hype as anything, though the interviewer played along nicely.
Now, because I’m a poor judge of my recordings right when I finish one – I always like them at the time (or else I wouldn’t call it finished) – I’m skeptical about my own excitement. I had my friend Jessica Lynne over on Saturday to do my latest podcast and we had a little extra time when we had finished recording. She was really interested to hear the difference between the old and the new, so I played her the one song she’s most familiar with – “Water Colors.” Somewhere in the middle of the first chorus she turns to me with big eyes and gives me a “Whoa!” and tells me her arms are tingling. Her excitement carried through the rest of the playthrough. Wow! Now I’m pumped – confirmation of the fur raising nature of these new mixes. Thanks Jessica! I think I might be onto something special here, and I can’t wait to play the results of this effort for you all.
There’s more to say about what this album is meaning to me as an artist and the focused vision I feel I am finally realizing after 20+ years. I will save that for a later post as we start getting closer to the time when I can give you a listen. Thank you for indulging me in sharing my early excitement!
