Into the Woods

 I've got a good life and I know it. I'm in no position to complain. In these times, I'm lucky to have a job, period, much less a job with decent benefits that affords me the time to work on my creative passions. I know I'm lucky. Lately though, be it the heat or the busy season at work, I've been finding it hard to work much on my music. I make time to practice and have been writing a fair amount, and I've managed to play out fairly regularly. But the projects that take a little more effort (videos, recordings, marketing plans, etc.) seem to be constantly on the back burner. It makes sense...those are the things that come less naturally than writing and playing songs.

I will always write and play songs. For the feeling it brings, for free and for no more than the cats and the four walls of my living room, I will write and play songs. It's that extra step of putting them out there, to make them available to whoever wants or needs to hear them-- that's the part I find difficult to dive into after a full day of work. Weekends are like desert islands full of Sirens: they call to me on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, full of promise that recordings, videos, press photos will happen. But then all those humdrum necessaries (cooking, cleaning, laundry, naps) leave me at Sunday night with little progress shown.

So it's time to get out of the house. Tomorrow I leave for a weekend in a rustic cabin in the Adirondacks (so thankful for friends who are real live grownups with property). While there I have the ambitious goal of recording a whole E.P. to be released in mid-July, early August. I'm no recording engineer, and this place is no studio, but at the end of the day, that's no excuse not to have some kind of lasting product of some of my songs. I feel like Josh Ritter taught me this: the song is the product, not the recording. And I can rerecord and remaster until the cows come home, but at least I will have something to hand people when they come to a concert and want to take home more than the memory. It's a matter of courtesy and respect, for the songs and for those who might want to listen to them. So I'm off to Speculator, NY. Pray for my hard drive.