Well, it looks like the next project I’m working on is a reconstruction of my old demo, A Ghost in My Shadow. I spent this past weekend reconstructing “Strivers for a Better Tomorrow” and “No Exit”.
In the past eight months, I’ve managed to reconstruct 11 of the 13 tracks I originally put online. There are many more tracks that I’ve left off from the original cassette tape (A Loss for Words), one or two I have no intention of re-recording. (I won’t rule out pillaging them for spare chord progressions, melodic phrases or lyrics.)
Six of those tracks are being redistributed to other projects. The remaining seven will probably end up elsewhere as well. Some may just remain outtakes.
Still, the momentum started when I considered putting “Faith in Religion” — the lyrics of which I seriously need to update — on Imprint. After that, I figured I may as well work on the old stuff while I take a break from trying to hash out new material.
I’ve noticed a few impulses that keep creeping up on me while I work on these songs …

  • I need either to get serious about improving my guitar-playing or to find a guitarist. “No Exit” is driving me mad because it’s a guitar song, and I can’t fucking play guitar! No matter how much I tinker with it, it will never sound the way it should. I also think “Faith in Religion” would sound much better driven by ethereal guitar effects than ethereal synthesizer effects.
  • I’m really tired of putting temporary melody tracks on these songs. I need either to get serious about singing or to find a singer. But I have a bad habit of writing melodies way out of my range, so I may have to go with the latter.
  • The Korg N364 has 500 sounds, and very few of them ever really do anything for me. I guess that dissatisfaction is how gear creep happens. Can’t find the timbre you’re looking for? Buy more gear. I so want to use Propellerhead Reason, but I need to buy an entirely separate computer. (Preferably a laptop.)
  • I dropped $260 on a used Kawai K4, and I keep resisting the urge to use it. The K4 has these odd habits that I won’t bore you with in detail. Suffice to say, it’s not the most user-friendly environment to work with the rest of my workstation, and it curbs my enthusiasm for employing it. No wonder I eventually stopped working on it.
  • I think some of these songs would really sound better if they were performed by live musicians.

Reconstructing these songs, though, has a quicker pay-off than working on new material. It took two days to lay down the basic tracks for “Strivers” and “No Exit”. I took a week before “Choices” resembled something usable.
So I’m just going for the short-term thrill for now and leave the more challenging work for later. What a lazy ass am I.