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November 30, 2004

NaSoAlMo: I'm done!

After much stress, fretting, poo-pooing, self-doubt, and a fair amount of writing and recording, I'm finished with my National Solo Album Month album. It does not yet have a title, but it does have a tentative sequence (front-loaded with the stuff I like best, natch). In the next month or so I plan to tidy things up a bit--re-record some sloppy takes, tweak levels and lyrics that don't sound great or don't make sense. I figure if the way people generally do NaNoWriMo is to write profusely and then spend the next month polishing, then I can do the same thing. I'll share when I decide the stuff's ready for general consumption.

Posted by lld at 11:04 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

November 24, 2004

Ticonderoga


Ticonderoga.

When I was a first-year college student in a small town in Iowa, I was in a band called Socket Wench. We played around campus a few times--there were always shows to play since it seemed like there was a bit of a band explosion on campus then. A group of high school kids from town, mostly professors' kids, would sometimes play with us. They were called Vivid, and we thought they were the cutest things in the world.

Okay so cut to now, ten years later I moved several states away. Some of my new friends here mentioned that they know some people also from Iowa, but I didn't figure I'd know them. Turns out that they were the Vivid kids (minus one), all growed up and playing under the name Ticonderoga. They had moved down here just before I did, and kept playing together. Now they're a great band who just signed to a label and are poised for greatness.

I saw them play live for the first time last night, here's a couple pics. Click for slightly bigger.

Ticonderoga 2

Posted by lld at 10:08 AM | TrackBack

November 20, 2004

Shearwater in Wilmington, NC


11/19/2004

Posted by lld at 10:48 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 11, 2004

NaSoAlMo update 2

I've got five songs! Totalling 14:41! It's palandromic! It's almost halfway done!

I don't know how everyone else is approaching this, but I'm hoping that I can get some stuff out of this that I will like, and will have really worked on. I have been trying to flesh out the songs as well as I can--it doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to do an album in a month just by singing into a single mic with a guitar, but not many songs I've done with solo guitar sound good to me. I remember a quote someone said about Sylvia Plath: that she always wanted to fashion something out of a poem she worked on, and if it didn't quite work out as a piece of furniture, a chair or a table, she could at least make a toy. I have been thinking about that often as I try to turn my ideas into songs.

Bonus link: Lou Barlow loves cats. (hey, so do I!)

Posted by lld at 10:45 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 09, 2004

NaSoAlMo update

Well it's the 9th, almost a third of the way into the month. I've got three songs mostly done, and together they total about 8 minutes and change. Not enough! Worse yet, I keep getting bogged down with fixing little levels issues and stuff, and that ends up taking hours (see for example all of last night). Furthermore, I'm a little hard-up for ideas, and for some reason whenever I consider a lyrical possibility, it always sounds hopelessly dumb to me. That is just a personal hang-up, but knowing that hasn't made it any less paralyzing, really.

There is comfort in numbers, though, and Mark (aka Cash Nexus) has put up a great NaSoAlMo page, which includes a list of participants in the sidebar, with links to their pages if possible. It's good to read about others' experiences, especially when they mirror my own "oh crap, 30 minutes is like 15 two-minute songs! I'm screwed!" feelings.

Posted by lld at 04:19 PM | TrackBack