I haven’t blogged in several days because I imagined it would feel like work. Ahhh… the strength of my aversion to work. I also made the excuse that I needed to sort my thoughts out so I could write about one thing and not the many threads that I’ve been weaving and chasing over the last few days. Too late for that now – I’ve started writing.

I felt very discouraged about paper playing several days ago. I took out my electric guitar (I play a Hamer Duotone) and plugged it into my amp to work on some music ideas for a new song. I haven’t sketched on electric in a long time. I often can’t bother with the setup time and I don’t want to have good ideas waiting on me while I untangle cables and power cords. What was frustrating was not being able to get the sounds I wanted. My amp (it’s a Laney GC50A acoustic/electric combo) is in desperate need of repairs so the electric channel is next to useless right now. So I was trying to work with the acoustic channel, which really doesn’t give any help to guitar effects – everything sounds a bit dry and muted. I even tried to work with headphones, just plugging straight into the output of my effects pedals (I’m working with Visual Sound stuff – a Route 66 and an H20) but the levels were impossibly low. In the end I couldn’t really test my concept. I couldn’t really hear how good or not good it sounded.

When I add equipment shortcomings to the thought of the scale of what I’m attempting it’s very discouraging. I feel like not bothering. I guess there will be days like that though so I need to try to remember why I decided to do this in the first place.

I didn’t get much paper playing related stuff done this past week. Work has been demanding and I haven’t yet figured out how it make the most of the several hours that I’m not working. I much prefer having long blocks of time to having 1 hour between activities. I think now is when I’ll have to learn how to grab the moments though. Work isn’t going away or promising to get any easier anytime soon.

I did have a good writing session yesterday morning (Emancipation day). I was able to lay out ideas for this new song and explore the perimeter of the concept. Interestingly enough I didn’t write many lyrics – as in lines that I expect to keep for the song – but I generated a lot of good ideas and images… at least they seemed good at the time. We’ll see when I look back at them later. It felt relaxed, which I think I needed. I tend to pressure myself to come out with more tangible acheivements – a verse (our at least most of one), a chorus – just something that I can say is done or 1 or 2 lines away from being done. It was nice to explore without putting that pressure on the process.

So I push on. I’m harbouring dreams of meeting with some musicians on Wednesday (Independence Day) to sell the vision for the project and to play a couple of songs. If I’m doing that I need to organize it today.

“Starting from zero got nothing to lose…” Tracy Chapman, “Fast Car”