before you can move the piano, you must first move the elephant.

how to misplace a song in four easy steps:

1/ write song
2/ move into a new house
3/ lose track of the lyrics in the process
4/ say, “where the hell is it?” repeatedly, like a mantra, while looking for lost lyric sheet when you realize it’s missing roughly half a year after the fact

i remember the first line, and the last line, and nothing in between. it’s frustrating, because this is one of my favourite things i’ve written on guitar in standard tuning…but until i find the lyrics, wherever they may be, recording the thing is impossible. searching for one piece of paper in a sea of thousands upon thousands of pieces of paper is going to be fun.

i did decide on a final mix for promises, so that’s something. mixing the drum and bass tracks was a little tricky, what with the unusually resonant THWUNK sound of my detuned kick drum eating up a lot of the low end, but i think i found a good balance. funny how just a few years ago i was planning on re-recording the drums and completely remixing everything, and in the end i basically just tightened up my original eight-year-old mix a little and used a tiny bit more of the triangle loop that was recorded to serve as a click track. i don’t know why i only thought to use slap echo on the drums for this one song and never tried it again even once, because i think it sounds pretty cool. actually, i think this song is one of my favourite things i’ve ever done, and i have no idea why. i could listen to it over and over again.

i now have about two thirds of the songs for that misfits collection mixed to my satisfaction, so it’s getting there. i just need to figure out how to package it and what to do for cover art. i was going to make use of some old pictures, but while i was looking for the missing lyrics last night i found a drawing my mother sketched of me something like eight years ago. it’s got an interesting look to it. maybe it would work well as a cover image. i also need to look at getting some sort of cd label printer and printable cd-rs of good quality (taiyo yuden, where are you?), since working with a media broker to replicate the cds has become too much of a hassle. it would be nice if i didn’t have to do every single thing myself, but seeing as how incompetence makes the world go ’round, there ain’t but the one way, as sly stone would say. trying to sequence somewhere between seventy and eighty songs over two cds in a way that makes sense is going to be a bit like extracting teeth, but i’ll leave that mess until all of the songs are cd-ready.

i’ve been having some strange musical dreams lately in which i come across songs i never knew existed. some of them are alternate versions of existing songs, while others are completely unlike anything i’ve ever heard, but it’s all good stuff. of course, i eventually have to wake up and realize they don’t really exist after all. i wonder what it means.