Sometimes I even wonder what I've been doing all this time. When so many people I know have put out multiple records, and I've only put out one.
But - I'm working on the next one.
I had a good long chat with a very accomplished musician about the different ways people listen to music. He hears, in great detail, what exactly is played, and how certain chord changes are unusual and surprising, and how certain melodic choices in jazz solos have meaning for the song. Whereas I'm, much like most luddites, a straight up timbre listener. What interests me is generally not what is played, but how it sounds, and what's behind it. Which isn't to say I can't appreciate interesting time signatures - i do more and more these days - just not as much as a strange and unusual guitar tone. So I realised after all this time of trying to learn to write songs like a normal musician, with a guitar and a pad of paper, that it doesn't work for me. Until the song is recorded, I can't tell whether I like it or not. It also made my horribly long album process make a lot more sense. I would half hazardly record some riff sometimes, then like it and try and go back and re-record it in a better way, and I wouldn't like it anymore because the tone of it was incrementally different, and I'd wind up recording the song over the badly recorded riff (that often wasn't to a click track, troublesome always) or scrapping the song altogether.
The other thing I've suddenly learned to do is compose without an instrument. I can't play at the speed of my thoughts, but I can sing at that speed, and so I'm trying to compose with just voice as much as possible, and then sort out the chords later. Though I'm starting to feel in certain keys that my fingers can keep up, which is a shocker for such a crappy guitarist/banjoist as myself.
Anyway, what I was going to say was that now I've sorted out these two things, as well as a dreamy, dreamy cabin on the island for the month of June, I feel super confident that I'll have an awful lot done on a new record before the end of the year.
It's still a strange process. My last record, obviously, had such a driving impetus behind it, such a clear over arching form to me, that it's difficult to know what to write next. I've found myself writing about happiness with the same shock and confusion that I wrote about sadness. I'm just as surprised to find myself contented as I was to find myself sad, years ago. Also, I feel like I've wrung out all the interest I had in sad music, and every minor chord seems dry and overdone these days.
But who knows. That could change by June.

That's enough about me.
I also have been up to other things, like getting to be in Bruce Peninsula. We just returned home from playing SXSW. I've been having trouble figuring out what to say about what SXSW was like, and all I can really say is, it was INSANE. It was CRAZY. Living in Toronto, one can almost begin to assume sometimes, not that people don't care about music persay, but that they don't deeply care about it... but then you go to a place where nearly every bar is thronged with crazed fans, lined up down the street, and the thousands stalk 6th street in a wild throng, and while some of them were certainly lost and drunken University of Texas students, many of them are jaded old musicians like us, managing to find a sudden wide eyed desire to squeeze into a crowded bar and watch a band we've never seen before. Also, it was lovely of course to see so many of the people who I've known and rooted for all these years sort of ascend and get theirs - Rural Alberta Advantage, Woodhands, Timber Timbre, all those folks, not to mention other Canadian bands I hadn't seen much of before prove their awesomeness, people like Katie Stelmanis and Hey Rosetta and Think about Life. And Austin is a fantastic city, and it was warm, and we lay on the grass living the Miller High Life and throwing frisbees around, and meeting like minded souls, and generally agreeing that it's one of those things we'll remember when we're old and grey.

The other thing that I've been getting to do these days is play producer for my other band (yep, that's three now) Entire Cities. We're making a record, and while our friend Heather Kirby did all the hard bits, recording bass and drums and guitars, I get to do the fun bits, recording vocals and saxophone and piano and whatever else we want to throw all over the tracks. And I get to kind of shape the album in the process. It's fascinating to take this role, to decide what notes and instruments and tones go where, and imagine how the whole sprawling thing can fit together in the end. I'm once again reminded of the many differences between live and recorded music, how something can be so exciting to watch, but so wrong once set down in the recorded track, and then again how a small change in the way the song is mixed or the instrument is recorded can make or break it all over again. A little hint of distortion on a sax takes a song from cheese to sleeze all in one instant, and then reverb on the vocals takes it back into the monterey jack territory, and then the addition of some panning on one of the guitars expands it again... I pretty much just want to do it all day, forever. Though I'm reminded again of how difficult it is to stay neutral and critical of a song that you might hear a hundred times, and I wonder at the job of producer who may record music he deeply dislikes, and yet have to find a way to make it good, not by his own criteria, but by the criteria of the type of music that it is. Also the difficulties of communicating what's wanted and what's desired and what's best, even within the context of a band I've been a part of for 5 years.
It's interesting too to meditate on how people make musical decisions when money and time (because I'm doing the recording) are not an issue. Sometimes I think the only way to narrow down the infinite possibilities is to go on a sort of voodoo. I had Simon write out a little essay on the meaning of each song, and I'm trying to translate it into instruments. While I think nobody will care in the end, or notice, it's helped us to make decisions on what should go where and how it should sound. Because while we could record for the next year or two, we don't want to!

And finally, someone special gave me a ribbon mic for Christmas and it's pretty much the best thing I've ever received. It's just a crappy Chinese made Apex, but it's so incredible. It sounds so exactly like the human ear, so dark and swoony and fuzzy and real, that I'm madly in love with it. I find it strange that the recording ideal now is bright and exact - well, I understand why that is - but I don't always like it. I can see how ribbon mic stuff could get bogged down in a big track, buried in low mids, but I also feel that it could be lifted and separated and stand out somehow. I also feel that it works so well for stuff heard on laptop speakers, where the high range is accentuated, and some well mixed tracks that sound fantastic on real speakers wind up sounding tinny. That said, it's interesting how it really suits certain male voices, but I still prefer my own voice through my old AKG that captures a little more fidelity and a little more breath noise.

Ah, the musings of someone who knows absolutely nothing about recording. I hope no actual producers read this.