When I started this project, I had just made my first album 2001-2005. It appeared on my own cottage industry website, with a Paypal button that wasn’t over-used, and released on home-burned CDs that didn’t play on some CD players. Little did I know then, that by the time I was happy with quality control and after endless revisions, my kids would be teenagers. Also, who would then have predicted a global pandemic would have granted me the time to bring this to completion. It had a working title of 201X, so it should have been finished long before then!
As any musician or artist knows, works are never truly finished, the creator, over time, just get less unhappy with their perception of them, even with positive comments from outside. I have spent countless hours listening to latest mixes when commuting or out running. Applying this level of scrutiny to one’s own works, is magnified by having done most of the parts myself, and it could be enough to put a downer on things! But over time, and with support and constructive comments from friends, they have crept up in my estimation, to the point that I am now ready to send them on their voyage outside of my headphones or monitors. And it is high time, as music and sound are constantly evolving, and creating that which does not date is a tricky business.
At the outset, I had the goal of composing simple songs, with little reliance, if any, on keyboards. This is essentially a one-man-band project, but as my main instrument is bass, and my voice isn’t much to speak of, I cajoled various musicians to help out on vocals, but with some guitar cameos too.
I would like to have had more input particularly on vocals, and some of the instrumentals were intended to be songs. Some have a few seeds for lyrics, but never quite happened. Others had just melodic ideas, that got recorded as guitars or keys.
Most of the tracks were ready in demo form quite a while ago. The more time consuming, and strenuous part of this journey was to hone my craft on the drum kit and also sharpening my engineering, mixing and mastering skills. The musical bulk of the last decade has been spent on getting the final 15% or so done. Not to mention the ups and downs of a full-time career as a software engineer, and moreover raising children. This is while trying not to get too obsessed with it all to spend time in the real world. But sneaking those spare hours in, often at the expense of sleep, to add that extra guitar part, fix that bass, or re-record the drums for the 10th time when I just got hold of a new mic or plug-in. But that’s the fun of it.
I hope there’s a track or two you even enjoy listening to here. I make no apologies for some edginess, that’s just what comes out, and I would hope for my music to always have excitement, interest and quirkiness. My next album may have some sparser, more chilled moments, and I have started assembling new and recent ideas already, as well as remastering some worthy demos and band recordings from the past.
As always, keep an eye out on www.pil.org.uk
See also Getting There – Recording Techniques – pil.org.uk for technical details, if inclined.