I'm taking some time this morning to go through the past year's work. I'm listening to all the songs recorded from April of 2020 up to today. It's around 123 songs. No joke. My intent, this morning, was to start selecting songs for one album. I set the number of songs at 10. "This should be pretty easy," I thought to myself at 4 AM. 

Well, no. It's proving to be something not so "easy." I think I need an editor.

During the past few months, since our moving into a temporary situation while our house is being built, I've been able to knock out an additional twenty-five songs (they say you can't do it all with headphones: feh!). During that period of time, I kept saying, "OK. Today's it. No more new songs," but clearly I can't control myself. However, I really have found myself resigned to the fact that, at some point, soon, I have to whittle it down to one album's-worth of music. 

I simply can't do it. 

Since April of 2020, I've recorded music that ranges from what I would call Smooth Jazz to Americana to Rock to Pop to Country. I've dug deeply into the roots of my musical upbringing and everything else during my nearly fifty years of paying attention to music. I guess, in the heat and fire of recording every single day, I've lost sight of what it was I set out to do...and it's really kinda cool.

Last year, during the height of the pandemic, when I had finished recording song # 58, my wife suggested a series of albums (she saw where all of this madness was heading). That thought was never too far from my mind, but I was hell-bent on doing one album. Just this morning, during our daily walk, Claire asked how I was going to group the songs. She wondered if I was going to have a musical theme or texture throughout the ten songs. I said that I would most likely have a certain texture in sound, but would like to incorporate songs from each phase of this project (as of this post the songs are in folders labeled Volume 1(songs 01-19), Volume 2 (songs 20-29), Volume 3 (songs 31-39), etc.). 

Yea. Right. In all honesty, I don't think that's going to work after all. I think a series of albums might be in the works. 

I love the idea of the chosen title When You Let Go. It means so many things to me on a personal level. I also love the cover artwork. The simplicity of the blue water color with the simple name/title logo at the bottom. I recently put together a red version of that cover for my own filing purposes. I was doing a different mix session on a few of the songs and they were coming out beautifully, but I wanted to have a different color for those mixes. An identifier so that I could visually spot them in the huge filing cabinet of my recording hard drive. 

I have since found other water color paintings similar to the blue and red ones. Maybe, each album will have a similar theme, cover-wise, with different titles? I don't know. What I think I do know is that there won't be just one album. When You Let Go will be a series of maybe five or six albums over the next three, four, maybe five years. 

I still have a lot of work to do on these songs (as I continue to record new ones). I have lyrics to finish and vocals to record and guitar parts to add. But, I am really pushing for an early-2022 release for the first one. If I can manage to release it by the end of March, I'll be happy. From there, it'll be a matter of putting another collection together from the pile of songs recorded. We'll see how this goes.

My fingers are crossed...

Stay tuned.