My new album (No Fortunes)

[midwayfair]

Some of you who are almost as addicted to this place as I am may know that for the third year in a row, I took part in the madness that is February Album Writing Month, which is part of why you were treated to entire hours during the day where I did not post.

I've written a huge blog post with all the writing process and technical details here. I also was so pleased with this year's results that I made it available as a download from the Baltimericana Bandcamp page. If you want to stream it, I HIGHLY recommend doing so there, as it sounds better there. Soundcloud seems to add some compression to the uploaded MP3s (I figured this out because on at least one song the backing vocals were noticeably louder than the MP3 on my computer).

For those of you who don't want to go to the blog or Bandcamp for some reason, here's the soundcloud list, which includes an epic collaboration with my friends Mosno Al-Moseeki and Joe Scala:

[cloudset]https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?visual=true&url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Fplaylists%2F85309467&show_artwork=true"[/cloudset]

For the gearheads/people into weird noises and fun stuff with pedals, track 3 uses like, all the fuzz, track 7 has (what I think is) an excellent guitar "horn" sound (check the blog for the deets on how I made it), and the outro of the last track ... ah, hell, I don't want to spoil it.

[peterc]

Lovely man, lovely...

[selfdestroyer]

Great job Jon, I bet it feels good to get another Febuary album under your belt. DId you find it to be very stressful to get this done or was it a pretty smooth process for you?

Cody

[midwayfair]

DId you find it to be very stressful to get this done or was it a pretty smooth process for you?

I was WAY ahead the first two weeks -- I had #10 written and partly recorded by February 16, and two of the remaining songs were collaborations. All fourteen were actually written a week ahead of time, but recording, #14 was VERY stressful. We weren't able to get together until the last day in the late afternoon, and we didn't finish tracking until 9:00.

So I only had 3 hours to mix a 12+ minute song suite, when "Last of My Kind" had taken probably 6 hours to get the final mix.

But Joe also had 5 songs he had recorded live with some friends that morning (I think he recorded half his runtime in the last day, so he completely Beatles-ed it) and the tracks were an absolute mess -- so I had to mix those, too, because there was no way he'd be able to do it as fast as I could. Luckily they had basically the same settings and problems on all five final takes, so while there was no way to get them sounding good (the vocals were completely overdriven, the drums were bleeding into everything, the overheads were noisy, and I think there was mic missing either for the bass or the guitar ...), I was able to at least make it so that someone could listen to them and know how the song went instead of just an incoherent mass of cymbals.

After I did those, I did the full mix for "We Are Travelling ..." etc in under an hour and we got it posted at 11:57, three minutes before our timezone deadline. I wasn't totally happy with the mix (in part the fades needed some work), but we're going to do more work with it anyway.

I was way less stressed overall than previous years, though, and not just because I was so far ahead on the writing ... in part, I am simply better at all aspects of recording, including being able to play the parts I want and sometimes I'm even happy with my vocals. I wasn't struggling to play with the click and drums because I stayed in practice throughout the whole year.

I was much happier with my writing this year, and I think I've gotten better at working with simply saying what I want to say, and then tightening/poeticing it up afterward. (The hardest song to write this year was "Dakota" -- because I was fretting over whether I'd offend people, which is a bad mindset to have when writing.) Last year it was a struggle for me to identify stories I wanted to tell, which is normally my strong suit; and I spent so much extra time and energy worrying about my failure to write stories that I probably wasted opportunities to get more down on the page like what I was writing at the time.

So maybe I should say that I've just gotten better at turning off my inner critic and just rolling with the punches.

Knowing the software and my equipment better certainly reduced my stress as well.

I honestly think I could have recorded ten albums the "normal" way before learning what I did in the last three years from FAWM.

[Stomptown]

Very nice Jon!  I'm still trying to find the time to listen to the album in it's entirety, but I really like what I've heard so far.   

[culturejam]

I'm once again very impressed, Jon. I can barely find time to listen to the whole thing, never mind write, perform, and mix several songs. Well done!

[selfdestroyer]

Very inspiring Jon, thanks for the explanation. I definitely agree about knowing your hardware and software well to limit stress.

Cody

[jkokura]

I really wanted to do FAWM this year.

Great job Jon. I'll take a deeper listen soon.

Jacob

[blearyeyes]

Salt of the Earth Jon..Salt of the earth. Love it.