Fall 2025 Begins
Saturday, September 20th, 2025 01:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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74F and overcast this afternoon, after thunderstorms passed through in the early hours.
I'm waking up, and drinkng my coffee right now, and today will be the first fall session in Studio C, recording harmonies... after a two week break.
And it does look a lot more like fall out there today than it did two weeks ago.
This past week was what I was calling, "cinnemon summer," because it was 90 and sunny every day, but the majority of trees had now taken on color, and many were dropping leaves.
It's also dark now by 7PM, after which it immediately drops down to the 60sF.
The equinox is on Monday, and now it's only a month until Standard Time begins.
On Tuesday, I brought up a box of journals; 1990 to 1998, or, most of my twenties.
I skimmed through them, unlocking all kinds of old memories I'd forgotten about.
On Wednesday, I did a proof of concept for digitization... speech to text via Google Docs, using the vocal mike, plugged into the MOTU, to capture my voice.
And it was successful, so I ordered a USB mike headset on Amazon, which was delivered on Thursday afternoon.
Thursday night, with the headset, it was much easier to digitize a much larger section, and have it be readable, by simply saying, "comma," "period," and, "new paragraph," when necessary.
The first book in the box actually started in September 1989, with me starting my first semester at NIU, in DeKalb, so it was a nice place to jump in, right before the 90s begins.
So many memories and details I'd totally forgotten about!.. including the whole context and story of, Reavis 309!
JoAnne Addison was not my English teacher, but taught the class before mine, in that room. So I would show up early to get in there as she was packing up to leave, every MWT, and nod, or say hello.
She did, eventually, ask me if I'd been to the new coffeehouse downtown, which I had, and we ended up going on one date there together!
It went well, and we'd even exchanged phone numbers, but... it didn't go anywhere after that.
By Thursday night, I realized it was more efficient to read through and only digitize the good bits, and skip all the rambling sections... stick to the plot!
So last night (Friday) I picked up the pace and got clear through to May 30th 1990, the day I moved to California, after having become disillusioned with college... thanks to them screwing me out of grant money that was meant to pay for my daily living expenses.
At any rate, this is a totally doable worknight project!
I can put in eight hours per week, on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights after work, digitizing these old journals... without it affecting my work on the album at all!
It could still take a few months to get through this one box of journals, but there's no deadline, so who cares?
I'm saving each night's work locally as .rtf files, so it exists both in the cloud and on a hard drive.
And what I'm getting is the distilled highlights, and facts of my past, in the voice of myself at the time, in a crudely punctuated form, that can be punched up later, if I do get the bug to write a memoire someday.
69F and raining out there, right now! So, the weather really cooperated today, with the idea of this being the first fall session.
There are lots of locust trees along the way, which are all now half gold, and the sidewalks are absolutely littered with the gold confetti of their little pinnate leaflets.
Cloud cover on the way in was nice, but it was even nicer, on the way back to be strolling through a gentle drizzle, with rumbles of thunder in the sky, and a cool breeze. Many street lamps had even lit, their photosensors tripped by the dark skies, their light reflecting in the wet asphalt of the streets.
Of the songs that have harmonies, only four were comped and ready to go today... Other Friends, Clue Phone, Bed in the Suburbs, and, Closer to You.
I started with, Other Friends, as this was the most difficult. This harmony, that Tim used to sing, back in the Publik Nuisance days, was high enough that it would've been impossible for me back in the spring.
Operatic, is not a bad word to describe the heights of this harmony, and I was able to do it some justice today, but after four takes my voice said, Yeah, no... let's move on now.
After a smoke break, it was time to tackle Brian's old harmony for, Clue Phone.
It was just as high, and actually required more control, due to there being longer notes in some parts, that do a bit of fluttering down to a landing.
I did *okay* with this one, but it needs more practice.
After four takes, I moved on to, Bed in the Suburbs for which the harmonies were more manageable. I did two takes of that harmony, and then decided to call it quits for the session... renaming the files with today's date, before packing up the gear.
So, two songs got four takes, and one song got two takes... and the plan is to simply add more takes to these songs each session, as new songs get comped and come online.
In other words, for harmonies, it makes more sense to hit three songs per session and build up a stack of takes for each song over the weeks, as my high register improves... than to focus on a single song for two hours.
I nearly nailed Suburbs today, in the two takes, for example, and future songs will have easier harmonies, which means they'll be easier to nail quickly.
Thus, I'll always have time each session to add another few takes to the operatic harms of the oldest songs.
So, yes, after today's session, I do think I should have no problem getting this all done over the next five sessions... the final one being on SAT OCT 25, right at the start of my nine-day Halloween vacation!
And if for some reason there needs to be a few last minute vocal patches, I can do them at home, over that week, as I'll be home when the neighbors are at work!
Taking the long view of things, here in mid-September, I can tell I'm gonna remember 2025 very fondly, in future years.
The spring of testing the waters, followed by the hot summer of rucking to Elgym for weekly vocal sessions... and then the nicer fall harmony phase... then, hunkering down in the flat thorugh late fall and winter, in the darkness of Standard Time, to mix.
Colleen & Kevin's visit last week was perfectly timed!
The last truly summer-like weekend, after the end of the summer phase, to just forget about the album for a minute and tie up the loose ends of last year's house situation.
My journals back in my posession... the biographical narrative behind, Archeology's songs, finally unlocked... those inky words on paper finally transcending into the realm of hypertext.
The best years of my life are the ones in which I am engaged in a long-term creative project, and steadily making progress.
In more recent years, that was in the sphere of home improvement.
But it's nice to be back in the thick of recording again, as I was in my 20s and 30s.
What struck me this week, re-reading this journal from my 20-year-old self, is that he was not yet in the practice of delving into long term projects... or at least not solo projects.
I was only just finding some independence from my group of teenage friends... with bass playing and songwriting still being very new to me.
Recording wasn't even on my radar yet, and I was busy testing the waters of life itself... to see if college or California were all they were cracked up to be... and taking the pulse of all the women in my world.
Dates. Short flings. long conversations over coffee. Occasional make-out sessions.
I wouldn't graduate into the lone, stoned, mad-scientist, recording artist, until 1994. But once I did settle into that groove, that's when I really blossomed, as a songwriter.
There were some gems in the years before that, which are inluded now on, Archeology, but it did take until 25 for me to kind of arrive at the person I'd be, in this lifetime.
Of course, there were other things to master after that, like holding a steady job, and affording my own place... with adventures in room-mating, and long-term relationships in there, followed by adventures in taking care of cats, or, in the last, taking care of an old man and a house.
So, it is nice to have come full circle, here in my mid-50s, with time enough left to package it all up into a nice gift-box I can leave humanity with, before shuffling off the coil, to vacation in the afterlife for a while.
The goal, I guess, is to get into that room where they do the life review, and I'll be like, "Yeah, I actually cut together my own reel, if YOU'd like to see THAT!"
°¦}
