When I stop to try and catch my breath I realize with some relish that I am actually pretty excited about what the next couple months hold, and about how wide open everything has become. I have a plan, and I am looking forward to telling people about it in more detail when I have the first tangible pieces of it in my hands (or in my ears, I guess), but for now I can give you the capsule version.
This coming month–when, I can’t say for sure, as it depends on some things that are out of my control–I will be recording my third album, New Vanguard Blues. I have all of the songs for it–some of them have been released in some form already, but many have not. Recording it is going to be a deliciously quick process; I have been playing now for a few months without recording anything, which is foreign territory for me, and I realize that for the time being it is much better for my creative process. When I don’t record anything (not even roughs), the songs remain fluid and changeable in my mind in a way that would be impossible if I were able to play them back in any sort of immutable way. And it is going to be almost entirely voice and guitar, with very little embellishment (and very little expense). In this way it will resemble the process of recording Vile Bodies, except where those songs were often only half formed, and I used those couple days in the studio to flesh them out, or at least to give an impression of completeness, these songs have become more exact and more pointed as time has gone on, and my playing and lyrics writing has improved. So the recording process will be fast, fun, and solitary. When I am finished, I won’t be mastering the record–it will remain as is, and it will not be sold, at least not yet. I am going to immediately do two things with it when it is completed: first, I will send it out to every label that I have ever wanted to be on (there are only a few of them left in business at this point, unfortunately), and before I wait for any sort of response I will use the album as collateral for people who donate to a Kickstarter that I am starting up to fund my much more elaborate and only partially written fourth record, And The Late Romantics. In other words, people who donate money to help me make my fourth full-length will get to download my third full-length. This fourth record is going to be almost entirely through-composed for strings and voices, and will be idiomatically very different from New Vanguard Blues. If my fund raising is successful, the money will be used to pay session musicians, buy studio time, and maybe hire a publicist or something like that. That’s about all that I can say about it for now.
I have a bad habit of getting excited about these projects of mine before I start realizing them (and getting bogged down by the cloud of small problems that inevitably presents itself), but for once I am confident that the wind is at my back. It may end up taking a little longer than I expect, and worst case scenario, no label that I would like to be on decides to take a chance on me, and the pledge drive fails, but even then I will have a record that I can be proud of, and a method for setting things in motion that I can come back to later on.
This past weekend I played at Joe’s Pub, the first place I have ever played where I had a green room! Turnout was pretty good, the crowd seemed to enjoy it, and I shared the bill with the always-excellent Bing and Ruth, who had gamely agreed to come play on very short notice for such a complex ensemble. It was pretty neat to meet David Moore–he is one of my favorite living composers, and in my vainer moments I consider us to be of a kind–quiet Brooklyn scriveners, doing good work and not making much of a fuss about it. Joining me on saxophone for a couple songs was Gabe Birnbaum, aka Boy Without God. I saw his band play at Matchless in Greenpoint the following night, and they tore it up–keep an eye out for this guy, for real.