Continuing On

How things change when you forget to update your secondary blog in a while. Today I'm taking a break from Live Journal (there's a bit of a political protest going on because LJ's new owners have showed some cluelessness about customer relations, combined with some actions that make some folks worried that the cluelessness is the flip side of some potential censorship). So here I am, and I notice that I've said almost nothing about how productive and interesting the last few weeks have been.

Well, they have. In my last post here, I noticed that I'd broken a bit of a creative logjam. Boy, did I ever. I finally got a LOT of my semi-finished music tracks into a "finished" state. As with anything like this, I can think of a billion things that I wish I'd done better with those tracks. But it was time to let them go, put them out in the world, stop fiddling with them. So I did.

The end result was a almost-thirty-minute-long collection of instrumentals with a linking motif or two that I called "Themes For A Defunct Leather Bar," and an almost-hour-long collection of "pop songs" released as "Spring Hill Light And Power." Both went up on a new web site, http://www.dirigibleego.com, for my Dirigible Ego "band" project.

Um. Yeah. 90 minutes of music.

I've been getting positive comments on the material from various friends. Including from other musicians, *including* from people whose own work had been among my inspirations over the last few years. So while I'm still intensely aware, at times, of "how the song sounds in my head" versus "how it REALLY sounds out in the world," I can't deny that people have had positive reactions to what I've done. Sometimes unexpected ones .... in the sense that, sure, people are interested in part because they're my friends, but when they mention liking a track that I was ambivalent about (which. um. could be ANY of them, on any given day), or when they're moved by something I wrote. Yeah. That's good.

In particular, as I keep saying, I got a lot more confidence in my vocals, and more skill at rendering them well.

So that was a couple of weeks ago, and things have moved right along. I think I said, in my last post, that I was hoping to get some things out the door because I was getting backlogged on "new" material and wanted to stop obsessing over the old stuff. That remains the case. My Nano this morning carries draft demos of five new songs, and that isn't all of what I've got in work.

Add to that: one friend has stepped forward recently to say that he'd like to play with me. He likes my stuff, he wants to contribute ... and he's actually *come over* to the house twice now to start rehearsing.

This is kind of a big deal. A *number* of my friends have said, in the past, that they'd like to collaborate with me. Sometime. But most of them have lived at a distance, and *all* of them are at least as busy as I am. Or something seems to get in the way. More than once I've emailed someone a track I was working on and ... not heard for a long time. I've gotten VERY good at talking back to the little voices inside that say "they wanted to work with you until they heard how weak your material is." It's life: there are a lot of people I would "want to" work with that I haven't, or don't have time to. It's not really a comment on anything other than the impossibility of having it all. (Good lord, my family member Pepper has been *begging* me to play music with her for *years*. I just can't get motivated .... we're stylistically distinct enough that it just hasn't called to me yet.)

So to have someone actively seeking to work with me, because he likes what I'm doing. Yeah. That's really great.

It's a very new collaboration, it's already forcing me to take leadership and ownership of what I do. That's new territory, a bit scary, so I haven't made any big announcements about who it is or that we're working together. I need to give it time to breathe, time to let myself inhabit it.

But it's really awesome.

Of course, I'm laying down vocals for some of these new demos and thinking "Gah. I'm much better than I WAS and not at all where I WANT TO BE." ;-) So the struggle continues.

Still. These new demos represent so many levels of improvement over the past, in terms of imagination and how fast I can get new clunky ideas out and less-clunky.

Truly, for all the self-doubt (that I suspect I would carry around with me even if I were, let's say, Bono), my God, I seem to get a lot done.