How difficult is it to start an album? As difficult as I allow it to be, I suppose.
I realized Friday that the Mermaid Parade isn’t until NEXT weekend, and rejoiced at the prospect of having two consecutive weekend days to kick start Asterisk. My ambition deflated early Saturday morning. I’m still trying to determine whether the self sabotage came from within, or from external voices I internalized.
External voice 1: The man who works at the guitar store. I told him I needed the vinyl string guitar fixed up because I was recording an album. He asked where. I told him it would be self produced. He insisted I call his friend. He wrote the number on the back of the sales order. When I went to pick up the guitar, he asked if I’d called his friend, insisted “what do you have to lose” and “yeah, you can play but you can’t produce”…I explained that it’s too late, I tried for months to find someone and now I have a schedule to stick to and people coming over. He had me feeling…bad…like if I didn’t call his friend…I wouldn’t be able to do it…”Just call him. What do you have to lose?” Um. Time. I had to shake that off. It took a few hours. That feeling of “needing” someone or I won’t be able to “pull this off”. I had to remind myself that some very incredible, even prominent producers gave me great advice and a vote of confidence that self production is the best path for me for now.
External voice 2: Someone made fun of my song. And someone else told me about it.
Internal voice: I’m still at it. I’m so old. Not hot. Not sure when that happened, when my chin doubled and these lines cut into the sides of my lips. If i painted it would be an age appropriate artistic expression. I have to make this album, because…well…simply because. Because it happened. Because I wrote all these songs, and they can’t float unfinished on my blog. Unfinished meaning unpolished, unproduced, not good enough to be released on stream services. What else can I do? It sort of irons out the motivation to think that I will never, ever, ever be a prominent touring singer/songwriter, but I still have to do this, I owe it to myself. If the delusion of one day being popular has been stolen away from me by time, I must find the joy in making this album some other way. Because if there’s no joy, then why? But yet I have to do this. I have to. Joy or no joy. I have to because it is before it even has become.
By the way, in this self deprecating struggle which lasted through the weekend, I erased my application on the Songland website. They don’t have old people on their show. Who am I kidding? I just deleted it to spare myself the rejection.
And on that note, instead of recording this weekend I slept all hours of the day, watched soccer, jogged, and ….. finished Setting Sun… because it wasn’t good enough… I thought it was finished, but in attempting to record realized I rushed it because I WANTED it finished according to schedule. Recording only reminded me how awful some parts were. Of course at first I deemed the whole thing un-salvagable, but stepped back and concluded it’s mostly pretty good but just too lyrically OBVIOUS in some parts. So I shaved off some of the concrete stanzas, added some abstraction, remained true to my feelings, and voila, a song is born. I can’t say the weekend was a total bust.
I just have to pray, wish, pull for a higher power to give me the strength to pull this off. Asterisk. And FAST. I can’t wait 10 years. Or even 10 months.