Milestone: Getting Ready to Sing

In Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, the process of flying is described as aiming at the ground and missing. One has to transcend the improbability of defying the laws of physics and gravity. It's an attitude, a mindset that enables you to overcome self-doubt. The moment you get the idea into your head that you're actually flying is the moment you go into a tailspin and crash. Of course, he didn't come up with this idea entirely on his own. Hindu and Buddhist traditions have taught this for centuries. But a steady diet of Douglas Adams in my teens and a steady practice and study of meditation as an adult have enabled me to put this strategy to work in the making of the album.

I've never spent a year on an album in my whole life. I've been adding to the woodpile since September of last year, determined to make an album but just a little bit dubious about pulling it off. And it's funny, because that nagging feeling that you won't come up with enough good material dissipates quite suddenly when you count up what you have and realize that secretly and without fanfare, you have reached one of your goals.

I now have the basic tracks for sixteen songs. My guess is that five of them won't make the final cut, not because they're bad, but because the other eleven songs sound like they work together very well. So that's eleven songs that need vocals and a few other overdubs.

Writing the lyrics, a source of strife and torment to me over the last decade, is starting to happen naturally. As I've said earlier in this blog, writing songs to me is like learning how to speak. The music comes first, and as my capacity to express myself grows and the music takes form, I learn what I'm trying to say. The music tells me what it's trying to express. That wasn't just bullshit. That's really what it's like. And true to form, the words and ideas are starting to flow. I expect to spend the rest of the year writing lyrics and recording all the vocals. Whew!

I had to break through a long period of writer's block to make this happen. The past ten years were tricky for me, and the drama of life left little room for being consistently creative. The making of this album has been a process of healing and learning how to speak again. And what brought me to this point was aiming at the ground and missing. I concentrate on what I'm doing and not why. That's a key thing there: Non-attachment to results gives me the freedom to concentrate on craft rather than what people will think.

When I find myself in self doubt, I stop thinking that way. When I find myself enjoying the music I'm making too much, I pause and breathe. When I find myself either worrying about what people will think of the music I'm creating or believing that everyone will love it, I distract myself. When I find myself getting overwhelmed at the amount of work there is yet to be done, I concentrate on the task at hand.When trying to fly, I aim at the ground and intentionally miss, forgetting the fact that I'm flying and just doing it.

So now it's time to sing and there's still much work to be done. The album isn't nearly finished, but it's a lot closer than I could have envisioned a year ago. Just writing this blog entry gives me a good feeling, and while a certain amount of closure is pretty healthy and necessary, I have to forget even that feeling of accomplishment so I can move on.

Stay tuned. Cutting the vocals will soon be underway.