International

Concept

Album

Month

After long deliberation, i decided to go light-hearted this year: an album of tracks each inspired by a classic and/or memorable video game from my youth.  For some, i plan to use metaphor or narrowed focus to make the track content more like a "normal" song, perhaps even obfuscating the game itself.  (I look forward to having fun with how that turns out.)  In terms of production and accessibility, i think i'd like to continue to push the envelope from last year's challenge and move another step closer to a professional-sounding record.  For me, this likely means simplifying my instrumentation, so this year's focus may lean heavily toward my over-two-decade-old songwriting roots of just vocals and acoustic guitar with minimal additional instruments.

Overall, i'm fairly proud of the results of this year's challenge.  As has often been the case, i was very pleased with the songwriting/compostion side of the album from the creative standpoint.  Not only did i meet my goal of writing songs about the games i selected, i also worked a few puzzles into the album to make it (sorta) a game itself!  As has always been the case, there were some production compromises that limit the album's accessibility as a traditional pop/rock record.  As i had set out to do, i did successfully bring up the overall recording quality relative to previous years' albums.  However (as expected), doing this required that i severely limit my instrumentation.  This meant that, instead of last year's album of fully instrumented songs with obvious quality issues, i had decent-quality songs that likely sound "unfinished" to most listeners.  On the whole, though, i consider this a win, as i was able to accomplish my goals as prioritized fully within the parameters of the challenge (with, in fact, nothing pre-written or pre-recorded other than a few samples used on one track).

TBD

I'm calling it a win with room for improvement.  For the challenge Rules:
40: Every year, as happy as I am with what I produced, I've been WELL short of 40 minutes. This rule was my goalpost this year. I am happy to say I produced over 40 minutes of music. No cheats, no padding, artificial stretching. All music.
30: Nothing was done beforehand.
20: Ditto.
10: Everything is completely original.
0: My only miss was there was no concept, not even an attempt at one.
My goal was to hit 40 minutes hell or high water.  Now that I've done that, my goal next year will be for a 40 min concept album.  Nevertheless, I'm calling this year a win.
This year I used a spreadsheet to plan and keep track of things.  Once I had what I call "seeds" in place, I noted the bpm and thus how many minutes I could get out of various clusters of 16 measures. This was invaluable to keep me focused and productive. If a song went longer than anticipated, that took pressure off the rest of the tracklist. If a song felt finished with fewer measures than I had anticipated, I tried to find ways to boost other tracks. Near the end I simply decided to create another short song. The whole process felt akin to outlining a book or storyboarding a movie. It is a method I will certainly use on future JoCoAlbMos.

The subjectivity of interior experience vs. the objectivity of death, taxes, and rent.

No clue yet, will be brainstorming throughout the week.

The lyrics and arrangement are written but I haven'trecorded. However, many of the songs have been performed live. Infact I've done several last weekend at Lamb's Retreat forSongwriters. Plan on doing more this week and next weekend.
Rule of 40 - YES, barely
Rule of 30 - YES
Rule of 20 - YES - nothing recorded
Rule of 10 - YES - one cover song - from the public domain with a newmelody and chord progression
Rule of 0 - sure...
Experience - good overall. I'm happy with the songs I've wrote, butneed to make sure I record them. Looking forward to trying again.

Songs I've written over the years that I don't want to lose . .

My niece and I have decided that we are going to collect a series of eclectic pieces of audio art. We will write and perform songs and poetry and combine it all as a tribute to the value there is in being inherently eclectic. Because we both fully believe the world is not just one kind of beautiful.

A celebration of the solar system.