Taking stock and making new music

I finally got around to starting my next solo record last night. I have most of the material written already, so all that's left is recording. I smashed through the first song, "Call Me Ishmael" yesterday. I've still got a bit of vocal work on it, but I'll post it to my myspace page tonight. There are some songs left over from The Curious Flying Machine as well as some brand new ones.

Speaking of solo stuff, I started cataloging all of my songs from about 2003 onward. I have around 100 songs recorded since then, but I know that I'm missing a bunch. The scary thing is that I know I've "lost" a bunch because I never recorded them. It sucks to look through old notebooks and find lyrics or chords to something that was never recorded. I guess Noel Gallagher was right. If you go to sleep and wake up the next day having forgotten the previous day's song, well, it was crap anyway!

All of the cataloging was pretty interesting. Looking at the songs, there were definitely threads of ideas that were dropped. Theoretically, I could go back and assemble all of the stuff into the intended albums/EPs, but it's great to just have an Excel spreadsheet listing all of the locations, names, and details for the last 5 years of creative output. Here's some of what I've found:


Clever Love EP - recorded in 2003, and reviewed on Threeimaginarygirls.com
Track List:
Clever Love
The Unwritten Letter
Birthday Waltz
Silly Boy Dreams
Weeping Wall
I'll Get You (by The Beatles of course)

Perhaps the Next Day EP - recorded in 2003 and intended as a follow-up to the previous EP. I never threw this one together, and some of the material landed on Shutdown Vol. 1
Track List

Perhaps the Next Day
Proof
The Grand Exit
Lonely Surf
Little Things That Happen
In the Meantime
Crying (Roy Orbison cover)

Shutdown Vol. 1 LP - I have a real soft-spot for this album. There was so much material recorded, that I found 4-5 unused backgrounds along with rough demos for almost all of the songs as well. I never did finish designing the cover for the album, but imagine me on the beach, a surfboard, and a typically rainy Seattle day. Fun! If I were all famous and stuff, someone could make one of those outrageously expensive "Super-Deluxe" versions of this album with the second disc full of unused songs and drastically different demo versions. The (d) next to a track name means that there is a different demo version as well.
Track List

The Mighty Crash
Repeat History / Godspeed (d)
Perhaps the Next Day (d)
Slide (d)
Ghost Talk (written with Matt Gervais from Curtains)
Time
Shutdown
Tourism
Lonely Surf
Bad Words (d)
Surfer Blues
SfL (written after the death of my Grandmother, Louise. It stands for Song for Louise)

Unused songs:

4
Wicked
Normandy
Hole In Your Heart
The Moon Was Out (vocals only doo-wop song... someday I'll finish it)


The City of Good Neighbors LP - This one is the first "cohesive" album I've ever written. Everything on it was written specifically for it. Some of this stuff ended up on the first Curtains For You record. It's pretty psychedelic at times, and very poppy at others.
Track List

A Beginning
The Big One
The Pugilist
King for a Day
Insomnia Can Kill You
The Diagnosis
She Married the Earth
Futurebright
The Ballad of Gavril Ivolgin
Small Change
The Island Life
Skating with Wilma
(HIDDEN TRACK) The City of Good Neighbors

After CoGN, I started to write a straight ahead pop record intended to be called Dumb Angel. I never finished the album, and Dumb Angel wasn't even written until my last record for the RPM Challenge. Here is what I had for the album.
Track List

Halictidae
Hummingbird Blues
Surprise
The New Deal
Licorice Skies
Watches & Trains
The Missing Piece
6/5




Next comes my last LP, The Curious Flying Machine I've blogged about it before, so not too much to say...
Track List

Roadtrip to Disaster
The Great Land Grab
They Could Have Been Bonnie & Clyde
Just Like That, She's Gone
Sal's Wild Years
Sal & Ramona
Safety Glass Blues
Dumb Angel
Blueprints
I Can't Explain
The Curious Flying Machine


The next record has these songs so far

Call Me Ishmael
Selling The Future
Briars & Brambles
Apex Blues
Ballad of Molly McGinty
The Song of the Ants
What it Takes to Get By


So, in my hyper-OCD way, it feels good to have accomplished a pile of stuff in the last 5 years. Maybe someday I'll go back and finish some of this stuff. Until then, they all live on my hard drives collecting virtual dust.