Join My Song?

Happy Fourth of July! How would you like to add seven seconds of audio to one of my songs?

I've gotten a lot of work done on the tracks for my upcoming album, I'll Live, over the past few days, and I had an idea for one of them, "A Blur." I know a lot of musicians and singers and dabblers in the musical arts; it'd be awesome if I could get some of them to contribute their own short bits to the song, in the repeated verse at the end.

It's a very simple piece, and you can download stem files for the drums, bass, guitar, and vocal parts I've recorded here. It's just an E5 and an A5 chord, and the line "Better that your life be a blur than a blurb!" at 136 bpm. I'd be delighted to add your vocal and/or instrumental recording to "A Blur," and of course your name (and URL if you want to share one) would be credited in the liner notes once I self-release the album later this year. Whatever you want to do that fits with the tempo and idea would be welcome, as simple or as complex as you want to be, and it doesn't need to be perfectly quantized and recorded at the highest bit-depth known to man or machine. And hey, it's only seven seconds...

Anyway, thought I'd ask. Please drop me an E-mail (andysilva@mac.com) if you'd like to take part or have any questions, and have a great July!

Nah... No WriMo

I wrote the lyrics to three songs today. I opted against trying to do NaNoWriMo this year, because frankly I've got enough on my plate without stressing myself about writing 1700 words a day for the month of November. I'd still like to try my hand at writing a novel, and I've got an idea about taking some of my previous ideas and putting them together with an old short story idea; I don't know if I'm going to attempt this for the next NaNoWriMo, or just do it at my own pace...

...but right now, the album is my creative focus, and so I finally sat down and wrote "Morning, Doves" and "A Blurb" and "A Blur" today. The first was inspired by the loss of a friend (in that most final sense) as well as the end of a romance; the second and third are intended to bookmark the album as its opening and closing tracks respectively, and were inspired by my quote: "Better that your life be a blur than a blurb." I added a few more lines to a fourth song, "They Might Be Roses," too, but that one's not quite done yet, and I'm not sure if it's going to be on the album anyway. Perhaps it will; that would bring me to 42 tracks, and we all know how relevant that number is.

Yes, this thing is going to be a bit gargantuan. I'm planning on using a number of the songs from Joy in the New (remixed and mastered), a number of the songs I've recorded since then, and ten or so that I have yet to record. I've been working on the remixing, and I was quite happy to find the original multitrack recording of "Hole in the Wall," which I'd thought I'd overwritten well over a decade ago. I've also been working on demoing and recording some of the new stuff.

I haven't quite settled on the album title yet, but I may go with The Unfortunate Truth, Signifying Nothing. A reference to myself, a reference to Shakespeare... what's not to like?

I'll tell you what's not to like: Daesh. Fuck Daesh. I don't have very positive feelings for anyone who lets them win their games and gives them what they're after, either. Islam is not at war with the rest of the world, and refugees fleeing from death and destruction are certainly not at war with the rest of the world. It's Daesh, the bigots and sowers of discord, who want to kill anyone who doesn't think exactly like them, and anyone like that deserves our contempt, all of our contempt.