New Album Production Journal: Day 211

I'm finally starting to wrap my head around this past weekend and I think I'm happy with the way things turned out.  Maybe that sounds crass of me to say, but the truth is I think we need a lot of the perspective afforded by the passing of time to objectively understand events like RWIII where a lot goes on during a short period of time.  In the moment this weekend there were times where I was gravely concerned about our productivity and even the album itself.  (And after I got home and found out my car is severely fucked it (irrationally) reinforced everything as being fucked.  Fuck fuck fuck!!!!)  But ultimately I think we got a lot done and did it well.

For me there were two extremely significant things that happened RWIII weekend:

1. Beat-By-Beat Discussion - we sat down as a group and discussed every beat we had up to that date and discussed them until we all agreed on what to do with them.  We've never had to do this before because we've never sat down to consciously make an album, so it was a little weird at first.  What are we doing? here kind of awkward.  It quickly proved to be extremely helpful as we hashed out a lot of ideas I wasn't expecting.  We cleared things up.  We planned things.  We through hundreds of ideas out.  It was incredibly productive and a lot of the credit should go to Scurvy D who did a tremendous job leading the discussion.  One of the biggest reasons this was so significant was because it reinforced a lot of great assets we have in the group, such as Scurvy D taking on the leadership role, or Forrest's willingness to be more explorative.  It set the tone for weekend too and I don't think we could have had a better start.
2. Writing - Writing new tracks was a double edged sword and it was sharp as fuck on both sides.  There were a couple of beats everyone hadn't written to, and then a couple where only I needed to write to--it wasn't pretty, logistically or in execution.  Scurvy D, who has written and recorded to almost everything had a lot of downtown.  Clearly this is something we need to be better prepared for next time (I'm looking at myself in a mirror as I'm writing this), but the other side of the sword was the huge break-through I had.  Part of why I was so unprepared was because I couldn't write anything of significance.  I don't like using the term "writers block" because it's a self-limiting belief and just thinking about it limits you, or justifies your excuse to not work on something.  But fuck it:  this was a giant ass writers block.  I cobbled together the first song's lyrics with something I'd hacked at prior to the trip and I stumbled into a decent performance.  It wasn't my best work but I got sort of a rush from doing it.  The next one didn't come until late on Saturday but once it did, everything. fucking. clicked.  And it wasn't really like old times either, where I was just glad to be through it.  I actually liked what I was saying and how I was going to perform it.  It was "Katherine Hunter."  It was "Money In The Bank."  It was fucking awesome.  I immediately sat down and wrote another one after recording and by the time I was done it was 3:00am on Sunday.  So, I let down the group by not having more prepared, but if the group only knew how huge it was for me to just have that time and be with everyone and just be, I think maybe they would understand.  I hope.

So though I worried about time we (ie I) could have used better, I like to take Scurvy D's point of view, which he stated during our debriefing session on Sunday morning, that the expectation that we would work constantly for 12 hours was unfeasible and unreasonable.  We were going to play NHL12 at some point, no matter what, and what's really wrong with that?  Rather than focus solely on what we could have done I'm thinking about about what we did get done for once, which was actually a lot.  We played and talked about every beat we have so far at length and narrowed down the beats that we are going to work on.  We talked about the tone of the album.  We talked about the direction.  We talked about the first track.  We talked about titles.  We talked about the cover art.  We recorded final takes for as many as three songs, which, compared to RWII is a lot.  I can't wait for the next one.

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The weeks following RWIII I've done very little in regards to work on the beat.  I've been thinking about different things to write about, puttering around in GarageBand when I can, but nothing substantive has really resulted.  December is National Goof Off Month so there's a lot of obligations coming down the road for all of us that will leave us with less time than normal to work on things.  I'm trying to be easy on myself and am allowing myself to be okay with this, but I know in a week or so I'm going to go back to freaking out.  SAMPLE PAGES!!!!  NEW BEATS!!! etc.

Actually the more I think about, the more I'm already kind of scaring myself.  I better stop now while I can.