I’m marking today as the official start of summer. All my guitar and CD production classes are done. I’m delivering the last 3 orphan guitars I have into the hands of teens. I will finish up and mail off a tunescape mix care pkg for chef Suz, mow a little, then I am FREE….so to speak.

I’ve been robbing time away from my song and veggie gardening, and I plan to reclaim it. The green thumb-time will come easy and be like a dirt massage…ahhh.. hey -it’s rich moist dirt…lol…even the ant bites seem therapeutic.

The song-time, or ARE YOU GONNA FINISH THIS STUFF YOU SAID YOU’D HAVE DONE MONTHS AGO OR NOT…as I refer to it in my head… is a different hoe to wrestle. Ahem. I’ve got all the tracks down, minus vocals. I sussed out all the dodgy drum parts and I’m scrutinizing the final bass bits now. I have waaay more guitars than I need (How-..Wha? Can you imagine that….?) I have everything I require and more, including pro ears to critique on call, producer resources in the hood to augment any gear situations that might arise…guest players if need be. But I want these last things to be woven in while I am in that music bubble, that zone, that zen-like state where you can see the album as a whole and in its parts in the order they should be in, with their daisyfresh intros, their thoughtful channel panning, their inescapable originality, and, in some cases, their undeniable butt-shakin’ thumpdythump! Yiah! You can hear it simultaneously as your jaded self, a pubescent teen, and a sleepy truckdriver and ascertain the impacts and the tone changes that may need to be met…phase shifter or chorus? Reverb and delay or just delay? Wah-wah or try out that talkbox simulator tho you have no idea what the bleep you are doing…

I find myself grasping back, retrieving first memories of certain songs and how their intros seemed to me at the time. What made me love the solos? Why didn’t I notice how quiet the drums were?  : }

Hush…Paint It Black…Watchtower…..Another Park Another Sunday…Taking Care of Business…Rikki Don’t Lose That Number…Heartbroken Bopper…Spirits In the Night…Misty Mtn Hop…Cliffs of Dover…Fire…Rollin and Tumblin….Locomotive Breath…Under the Bridge…7 Nation Army….non-stop random hits roaming my mind in every spare moment…

It seems so hard to produce an album with continuity today…so much distraction and fluff… I find myself concentrating on groups of records from earlier times that captured a feel, with a certain song cohesion and depth of thought that is rare now in the shallow gene pool of the pop music machine. So here I am, with my last little musical bits in a bag, trying to correctly spice tunes like accessorising so many prom-goers, while trying to see what it is they obviously all have in common.  Maybe I need to fire up that old ensoniq keyboard…..

Ooh…can you feel it? I’m almost there…HAW.