Building a new album, pt.1: mellow, unpretentious.

The hardest part for me at this opening phase, unfortunately, is keeping my head clear – creatively speaking. It’s a challenge for me to focus only on the music and how I can make it better, and not dwelling on future problems of getting people to notice, selling, and making a name for myself in some niche I don’t even know yet.

Those problems could be debilitating, really, if I thought about them much. Of course you could make the argument that since I don’t think about them much, I prolong the very conditions I rail against, but still. I’ve only got so many hours, and I’d personally rather spend them on making good tunes.

Current progress on the album is slow but steady. Morgan and I have 18 original songs that we want to cut, but there are two significant obstacles in our way: engineering and time. Time is obvious – we’ve both got day jobs, kids, and mundane responsibilities like bills and making sure the roof doesn’t leak.

Engineering is a more subtle problem.

My studio is located in a room in our rented home here in Berkeley, California. On one hand it’s a technical marvel, if you take the long view. Really, the fact that I can record multitrack music in my home at all is pretty fantastic. The downside of course is that I’m pretty limited when it comes to the quantity and quality of equipment. My last album, The Blue Book, was recorded with only two microphones, which means that significant portions had to be recorded in stages – ie, not really live. Morgan, who appeared on only a few tracks from that album, was completely dubbed in.

Maybe that’s how they do it in professional studios, I dunno. And maybe this may not matter to you at all. But at least to my ear, I kind of prefer a little more live energy in there.

So Morgan and I each have a handful of songs that make us happy, and we’ve bounced them off one another and worked them until they’re smooth. The goal with this record is to take a picture of the energy we get just playing the songs, naturally, like in your living room. Mellow, unpretentious, going more for performance than perfection.

The only issue, then, is that the performances have to be really good! Since we’re recording the core of each song live, and we’re seriously limited by the quantity and quality of mics, there is just no possibility of overdubbing or fixing anything. The slightest mistake means either ditching the track or shrugging and leaving it.

And after the basic, live core is in the can, Morgan and I are working to fill out other tracks, also as live and pure as possible. So far we’ve got the core of three songs done, and you can listen to unmastered, not-quite-finished stuff as we fill them out at the Work In Progress page.

As far as the other stuff goes, niche marketing and capitalist success and the rest of it, well, I’m just hoping that stuff falls into place as we go along. Sure, I want to make a good living at this music/art thing, but I think something’s off-kilter if you’re spending more time on marketing your stuff than on making the stuff in the first place.