For the last couple of months I’ve been writing & recording material that will become my first solo album. An EP really, five pieces of electroacoustic music. I’ve worked with many local folks in the last few years and it feels like a good time to put something out there that’s very personal, all me.

Initially my plan was to make the music only in my studio and all ‘in the box’ using only my DAW. I’ve made good progress and am into the third of the five pieces of music. As I was talking with my wife, Melissa Musante about the project she suggested doing an album release party. This sounded like a great idea but as I started thinking about it I realized that just playing my new music over a sound system while friends and fans socialize would be really boring. So I started working on the idea of performing the music live at the release party. This is where all hell broke lose.

As soon as I started thinking about a release party the issue of distribution and sales popped up. Online distro makes sense and the best system I know of for doing this is Bandcamp. But what about physical copies? Right around the time I started planning all of this I heard from a friend that Bandcamp can sell physical copies as well. Whether it’s a CD of the album, a shirt or coffee mug, Bandcamp can process the order and send an invoice to you so you know to ship product to your new customer. So I started working with my wife on what sort of art she could produce for a book insert and what sort of box could hold all of this. I searched for bulk pricing of CD replication, locally and nationally (happily ending up on a local firm) and started thinking about mastering of the final product. But why stop there?

When I brought up my progress with planning this album with my wife she asked about maybe doing something with original 2D art in the packaging, one artwork per song and printed to archival paper. This morphed into creating a rather boutiquey, limited release sort of box, hand-made, signed by both the artist and moi. What I didn’t realize until recently (not being a visual artist) is that the process of creative planning and sourcing of material for a project of this nature could take MONTHS not a few weeks. This pushed completing the album into the future, much further into the future than my proposed New Year’s Eve Eve Dec. 30th party idea.

But wait, THERE’S MORE!

Because of the nature of this album’s music it became clear that a rewrite was necessary so the material could be arranged, turned into sheet music and performed by actual human beings. So I put on the brakes, stepped back and started thinking about how to properly voice the ideas of these pieces of music with a view to ensemble instrumentation. This brings us to about 36 hours ago.

While attending a MARN event organized to help composers & bands do pre-production for album projects I was convinced, nay, proselytized by the MC of the event and the gentleman giving us sage wisdom on the art of composing with a view to crafting an album. After much soul-searching I’ve come to agree with them. My ‘solo’ album will be recorded at his studio, played by human beings across the room from microphones and not be generated by software only by me.

So where does all this lead to? My album will still be a very personal collection of music but will be created the way an album SHOULD be created: a record of people, playing music, together in a room, with scant overdubs. This feels good, less of an intellectual undertaking and more of an artistic collaboration among composer, performers, recording engineer/producer and visual artists. It will take a very long time to complete, maybe as long as a year. But in the end I’ll have something in my hands I can share with anyone who is interested, can say it was a true labor of love and was made by people I respect and admire.