The drums are done, the bass is done, 99% of the guitars are done, the flute is done, the percussion is done, the melodica is done, the synthesisers are done, guide vocals have been done, all that remains to be done is Martin's trumpet, some flawless vocal performances and a little bit of tidying up, and the whole recording part of the project will be done. After that will come a short break followed by probably weeks of trying to mix it all. I don't really have the attention span for mixing and having to listen to the same song over and over again for hours on end makes me go a bit funny. I'll end up with a bit of the tune we've been working on stuck in my head for days afterwards, and every now and then I'll start whistling it subconsciously before realising what I'm doing and angrily telling the tune to f-off, normally in a shop queue, on a bus or in some other crowded place. To the casual observer it must look/sound like I have some musical form of Tourette's. No matter what I do, even if I listen to other catchy music, the Tune creeps back into my head every time I drop my guard, which is probably once every fifteen-twenty seconds.
Spring officially begins in one week's time, and not a moment too soon. My songwriting has been exceptionally miserable over the last couple of weeks, and I'm convinced that the blame lies with the almost complete lack of daylight in my life. I've made rough demos of a couple of songs; "ohgodohgodohgodohgod", which is very slow and sad but has a lot of harmonic angles in it, and "Empiness is here again!" which as the exclaimation mark might suggest is actually quite a joyful tune with very miserable words. It's a bit like the Velvet Underground doing mexican kraut-rock at the moment. But not like that at all. It might well be that both of these songs get abandoned forever once the sun starts shining and some seratonin starts circulating around my system again.
I hope Rich has gotten over his mumps. Apparently it can be quite serious in adults, and can cause enormous and painful swelling of the man-parts which can potentially lead to sterility, all of which I'm keen to avoid. There seems to be a mini-epidemic (an oxymoron surely?) of it going around the town's musicians at the moment and I somehow managed to avoid catching not only mumps but also measles, whooping cough and chicken-pox as a kid, which means I'm at risk of catching them all now in their more unpleasant adult forms. But then again, if I was bed-ridden for a while I would finally have a chance to work my way through some of the mountainous heap of unread books in the corner of the bedroom....I'll have to check with Rich how bad it really is...
