Birthing a new album.

Well, yesterday I brought the final approved audio for my new album in to the duplicator (my art was approved on Monday) so my new CD is being manufactured as I type this blog. Hopefully I'll have the new project in my hands by the end of next week! It's a weird one...I hope I don't ruin any showbiz momentum I've been generating lately!

Before I turned in the audio, I had to listen to the entire record in one sitting (that's 18 songs, coming in at 61 minutes of music) so on a hot, beautiful night a couple evenings ago I drove around the Western Twin Cities Metro Area aimlessly cruising the freeways and cranking up the new album. It was very fun...who knows how many dollars worth of $4 per gallon gas I burned. It sure is gratifying to hear all those songs grouped together and sounding zingy and rocking after spending so long finishing the recordings.

In the past eight months or so, any possible free time I had was used to finish songs for this album. I'd record a vocal, edit a guitar part, shake a tambourine, transfer some ProTools files to my portable drive, transcribe lyrics, update my webpage, layout album art ideas, email my engineers, write checks, keep track of stuff, etc. It was a ton of work.

Today I spent two hours filling out copyright registration forms to send in to the Library of Congress, and registering my song titles online at the ASCAP site so I can (hopefully) get some royalties for these tunes someday. Those were really the last two businessy tasks I had regarding the album...now all I do is wait for the duplicator to whip up the first batch of hot, fresh, slightly aggressive Midwestern melodic Scando-American cerebra-pop.

As the afternoon moved along, I found myself with no music biz work to do for the first time in a year....so I spent an hour reinstalling the whippy cord blade thing on my Weed Whacker...it was quite an ordeal. I really had to follow the instruction manual. BUT I got the thing working, and I took it out front and Whacked the living crap out of the Weeds growing by my front porch. Man, that was satisfying. I'm looking forward to more Menards-runs and home improvement projects now that this CD project is done!