What I'm up to here

I'm starting this blog for a couple reasons. First, it's a matter of keeping myself accountable, if I keep writing about what I'm up to, and somebody actually reads it, I'll be more inclined to keep up some sort of work schedule for this album project I've got going on here. 

Secondly, in the world of self-recording and digital albums, liner notes are, if not dead, then at least somewhat less healthy than they used to be, so this will function as kind of the liner notes to the upcoming album. 

So what is the upcoming album? 

Well, for several years I keep joking about how the traditional music repertoire, from which I draw most of my material, is full of songs about these horrible tragic romances. Lovers die from disease, from war, from jealously (either of broken hearts or more directly at the hand of a jealous lover) and all that. And I kept saying that I should record an album of just "dead lover" songs. 

Well, as much as I joked about it, I realized that there was something strangely universal to these types of songs. People have long been fascinated by stories of tragedy and brutality. In the modern day, with all of our multimedia options, we turn to soap operas, true crime shows and reality TV, or we tune in to fictional tales of betrayal and murder and such. But in the past, in the days of broadsheet or further back into purely oral traditions, people still liked the same kind of gruesome tales. It's an interesting part of being human, and maybe as I go on with this I'll speculate on WHY we find these stories so fascinating, but for now it's enough to know we always have, and more than likely always will. 

So, I'll be spending summer of 2016 working on learning, arranging and recording a bunch of "dead lover" ballads. Somewhere between 12 and 15 of them, maybe a bakers' dozen will make it to the final cut, we'll see. 

I plan to record this whole thing at home, using some of what I've learned through classes and through experience. I have most of what I need, although I need a few hundred dollars worth of gear (an audio interface that will let me plug a good microphone directly into my computer, better software, maybe some cables and accessories). I expect to do most of it on my own, but I may try to con some of my talented friends into lending some of their expertise to the project. 

Hang around a bit, we'll see how it all comes out!