Side Project

For the last couple of years, since we finished the Scaremongers album, Born in a Barn, I’ve been working on a side project/solo project. Last night we went into Soup Studio to adjust the few final mixes. I’m normally nervous of listening to new mixes – I can put it off for days, worried its not going to be as good as I want it to be, as I *know* it can be. And I feel a little bit like that today.

But there are other forces at work. My wife is 38 and 1/2 weeks pregnant, and when the little boy comes along I know I won’t have time to spend on making music for a while. So I need to draw the line under the project, get it out there and leave it be.

Jon Landau said an interesting thing to Springsteen when the latter was having trouble letting go of Born To Run. I hunted it out this morning from the book Born to Run by Dave Marsh:

I’m sure if Springsteen hears Born to Run, he’d love to change a million things. But that’s not the point. These things are never finished, but you have to walk away from them at some point. Part of the creative process is letting go, knowing a near-perfect work in the wilds is worth infinitely more than a work-in-progress hidden away. And that’s the same if you’re working in obscurity out of a second bedroom in Streatham or a CBS-funded state-of-the-art studio in New York. If the record is worth something, people will be able to spot it, and if it isn’t, well, you’re just throwing good time and money after bad.

So today, I’m not too worried about the mixes, or not as much as I would have thought. My concerns regarding this piece of music are now where to get it mastered, what band name it should be released under, what name should we give the album, what the cover should be, what formats do you release music on these days, how can I promote it with a finite quantity of time and money, would the distributors who flog Born in a Barn stock this one?

I think the band is going to be called The Ephemerals. The album Stumbling Through The Feral Park. But I’ll probably change my mind a million times before the album is released.