The process of reviving some songs I wrote long ago in order to remake them for new ears has been what you might call hardworking fun. One day last week I woke up with a new intro for one of the songs in my head. Then in the afternoon I decided I didn’t enjoy playing the song anymore and recorded another one I’d previously written off. Then a couple of days later I gave both of them a public airing, which seemed to achieve a positive outcome, so maybe they’re both OK.

There are very few ways to afford to produce an album if you’re an independent act. I was hoping that a grant from the Ontario Arts Council would enable me to do this thing ‘properly’ but that hasn’t come off. This means I have to either abandon the project or find another strategy to bring it to completion. At the moment it looks like whatever is recorded onto my hard disk is going to be the final version. It’s doubtful whether I can get all the instruments I would ideally like but I’ll be filling in the musical (and technical) blanks where I can.

It looks like I’ll be borrowing a friend’s bass and playing that on some of the tracks and when the rest of the bass has been added by A N Other I’ll be looking for S O Mebody to add drums. Compared to the traditional way of recording my style of music, i.e. rhythm section first, this seems INSANE but life is like that sometimes.

I think the main reason to go through all this, though, is to forge a new relationship with the songs, and that’s what’s happening.