journal

Hello... er... is this thing on?

Well, ok then.

I guess the first thing to do is bring you up to date on this whole solo album thing. The impetus for this project started back in early 2001 as I was waiting for Gino and Joe to finish up their rhythm tracks for Standard Deviation. While I was waiting I wrote and recorded a piece called "Pleiades" to test out some new home studio gear I had bought in anticipation of tracking guitars for the aforementioned Electrum record. Since I had intended the melody to be vocal it wasn't going to fit with what the band was doing so I set it aside for later use. Then Gino and Joe came through with the rhythm tracks so I spent the rest of 2001 on that project.


In 2002 the band took a breather (largely due to Gino being out of commission after a serious car accident and Joe having tendonitis problems in his elbow). In the hiatus I just kept writing music. The early pieces included a short fun piece called "Internal Combustion", a 15 minute piece that I haven't come up with a title for yet, and a bizarre little grunge-jazz piece called "Picnic at the Slag Heap". In a lot of ways these pieces were studies in instrumental composition for me. I worked at trying to write pieces that used fewer musical ideas while developing those ideas with different variations. I also started to focus a whole lot more on melody than I have in the past because I figure it doesn't matter how many crazy rhythms I bang out in 13/8 if there isn't something melodically for the listener to grab onto and take away from the piece. Though I admit I still can't seem to lay off playing in crazy time signatures most of the time.

Also around this time I revived a piece I wrote with 2 of my High School musician friends back in 1989. A year after we graduated we got together one day to jam a little in my parents garage and realizing that as usual there weren't any covers the 3 of us all knew we started to write some music. Doug Upton, a talented keyboardist, had an idea for an introduction and I had an idea for the verses. Mark Young an extraordinary drummer and all around musical genius led us in arranging the thing on the spot including using the introduction idea as the chorus but changing the time signature and a fun instrumental break in the middle. I've lost touch with Mark over the years but Doug and I have more than once reminisced about that day. Everyone was contributing ideas, all the ideas seemed good, and the piece came together very quickly. Mark went home that night and wrote some lyrics that began "Welcome to life, its the main attraction".

The next day the 3 of us returned to the garage with my friend Phil, his 4 track recorder and a couple of cheap mics to try and get the piece on tape. We succeeded in getting the drums and keyboards recorded, but never got to the guitar or vocals. Unfortunately the original 4 track tape met with an untimely death in a junk drawer due to getting covered in some spilled glue. Luckily I did have a rough mix that was made at some point. From that I was able to sequence Mark's drum parts and learn most of the keyboard parts. For some bizarre reason the melody Mark was going to sing in the verses stuck in my head some 15 years later. I'm not about to start singing so I decided an instrumental version would be best and played the melody on guitar as well as finally track the rhythm guitar parts that didn't get tracked that summer.

I began to realize with this motley collection of songs I had about enough material for an EP. But I'm wasn't sure I wanted to move forward with it or if I was willing to do a record with sequenced drum tracks. Well the drum problem solved itself in 2003 as a co-worker who had heard and seemed to like some of this material suggested a drummer friend of his who might like to play on it. Mp3 files were sent around and suddenly I had myself a volunteer who had his own recording gear and could simply give me raw audio of finished drums tracks by playing along to my demos at his home.

Just about the same time this happened Gino, Joe, and I started to send each other emails about a 3rd Electrum CD. So I set aside my collection of songs to begin working on that.

Well that has taxed my memory enough for one sitting. I'll finish up the story another time.