2024 Forward

1. In Time
2. Never Arriving
3. Burrowing
4. Day Time
5. Do You Remember
6. Your Philosophy
7. Matter Of Fact
8 Useless Things
9. They Are Not There
10. The Day After Anything Goes

Looking forward, the plan is to start work on the follow up to Fire Printing. There are still several we’d done with Ric which didn’t get used. My feeling is we should start fresh. No doubt the songs with Ric that we’ve not used will find a home in the future. I did a quick inventory. There are three demos Scott had sent over which we never attempted. There is one song in progress, In Time. I believe this was one of the last things Ric played on. I might ask Joe to redo the drums so we have a fresh version to work on. I’ll keep the version with Ric for later use.

I think there are two demos Joe sent around the same time as he submitted his songs for Fire Printing. He sent over two more a couple of weeks ago, Day Time and Do You Remember. Scott and I both thought we could work these two up. That is a good starting point. Once we start working on these songs, I expect more ideas will surface.

I had an idea that I’d started last year. I only had a couple of fragments and a vague lyric idea based on two dreams. I put writing on hold so as not to get distracted from finishing the new album. Once I got back to this one, Never Arriving, it came together quickly. I had enough to build up an arrangement. My idea for the song was pretty specific and I managed to capture that. I decided it was ready for drum and passed it over to Joe with some notes about the concept. He got on it quickly and sent back his first draft. He’d interpeted the idea I had in mind. The first brick laid.

That meant I could move on and see what else I could come up with. This time I had no lyric or melody ideas, just the rhythmic feel I wanted to work with. I sat at the organ and played along until I found some chord changes I liked. I tried vocalizing over that. It was the right direction, but not the flow I wanted. I tried inverting the opening riff to get me into the vocals a little differently. Nothing came of that, but the idea was in my head. I woke up at 3.30Am this morning with some lyrics. It was a good idea that opened up the door. This time I decided to move to guitar to work it out. Everything snapped into place. It took me a good while to get the mics set up to get a clean recording of acoustic guitar and vocals. I got two verses and the second part recorded in just a few passes. I did go back and do a new vocal over the guitar. I’ve got an idea how to finish the song now. Another bit of lyric appeared, enough of an idea to complete the idea. This is the way things should go when I can focus on writing.