Recording Oncoming Trains and Life's failures

On Tuesday, I started work on the new album and managed to get four songs done.  The next session it took me about 20 takes to do one song and then the next day managed to do another 25 takes of Light Years Away.

The problem of recording anymore nowadays and this takes the fun out of recording when you have to redo take after take due to the usual rules.  I miss a chord here, miss pronounce a word there, or my voice would give out. Even got to a point that a case of flatulence was heard in the background so had to stop and redo that take all over again.  Of course it didn't help that I was coming from Madison in a blizzard to start doing the fucking song a couple hours later.  About the 40th time and take it was finally done.

It's been this way for 31 years.  The constant fighting to get the arrangements right, the song right and everything else that might work but I fight a lotta recording demons, my fingers and brain and mouth can't get the signals right, I can't read the handwriting of the lyrics and all kinds of what goes wrong goes wrong comes into play.  I tell myself this is supposed to be fun, I'm doing this because I love music and I love hearing my music on the stereo or on the radio whenever the net radio stations play it.  People say I'm fighting a losing battle anyway, nobody buys the music, nobody listens to it and there's so much out there that you can listen to in the first place.  I guess it goes all the way back to which I came out of the womb and into a world that hasn't accepted me in the first place.

I don't know if life has passed me by or I stayed too long in fantasyland to really do anything else in life. Whatever I have done I failed. I discovered football and wanted to be the star QB that lead the team to the state championship but ended up getting on the b to c to d squad and finally gave up on that.  I tried out for little league baseball in the attempts to have fun and make a difference but unfortunly fate had other ideas. Either I struck out or walked, nice to know in life that I never got a base hit in baseball.  And had a few baseballs go between my legs to a lose a game.  Basketball same thing, couldn't hit free throws, couldn't play defense.  My grade school girlfriend became a damn good basketball player, she could run circles around me in 5th grade.  True to form, I quit that too in high school.

But perhaps the biggest failure was trying to be a good boyfriend and that didn't work either.  The biggest mistakes in my life was in the year 1975 when I decided to try out for little league and see the year of shit begin with both grandparents that died and going to Michigan and falling head over heels over some younger girl that tended to fart about 5 times after she chased me around the yard.  After 1976 I never saw her again. The other big mistake was Janice and letting her get to me over the years. 

The 1980s were a joke, I dated nobody and when I did I was overbearing.  I gave my heart away to the most undesirable girls I would come across.  The ones that did find me attractive I blew them off, the girl in my Public Relations class that I saw at Kitty's and smiling at me and basically blew her off and watched her go home crying away.  Thought I could find her and explain my actions but that never happened.  There was Belinda, a good girl with a good heart.


In the 1990s I finally had a dating life and managed to date a good woman who had three boys but still thought a lot of me but after my appendix attack in 1996, she got too high maintenance and eventually went behind my back to date somebody for six weeks before deciding I was to go. And there was the psychopaths, the strip dancer from Denver, the snake lady of Spokane, the woman from the rainy state that was the inspiration of some of my greatest songs ever written and of course the brat, who may have been the most loving of all.   We shared the good times, endured the bad and I'm sure she has found a more compatible guy that can keep up with her.  I miss her, she was a part of writing a couple songs with me and will always be a part of me.

Sometimes in life you don't get the girl in the end, nor do you settle down and get married and bring children in the world so you can teach them values of life and maybe get them to learn an instrument and start a band. But as I go through these recording sessions it appears to me that I would be the weakest link and probably would be replaced.   A rocker at heart but get on stage with guitar in hand and I will fuck it up be it the words or the music.  It has happened time and time again.

Which is why when I play live I play behind the drums.  I don't know what happened in this life that I wanted to be a rockstar but ended up sounding like a dork everytime I took the lead on songs. Or do a station ID and sound like a dork.  I feel like giving it all up.  I'll never be the guy that plays live and gets all kinds of nookie at the end of show.  As a drummer I did get a phone number from a girl but she gave her numbers all out to everybody in the band and I was the one not into the joke.

For the most part Geoff and Martin has been the most supportive guys that I have ever known.  Most everybody would have been out the door after the first blowup but bless their hearts they stayed through the 80 takes of Light Years Away and telling me things will be all right.  But we're all fighting a losing battle, fighting outdated recording equipment that fucks up the tape after a while, or having the new technology's hard drive go out and they can't repair it.  I think I'm more inclined just to stick to the more safe songs of the back catalog just to complete Forthcoming Trains but I'm stubborn enough to finish it, and knowing it won't sell but at least I have something new to listen to.

The Big Crash Collection over and done with, the three albums served their purpose.  So it's on to Forthcoming Trains, I promised Diggy Kat, my A&R director that I'd would finish it for him to spotlight on his radio show.  The album so far is acoustic but we'll be working on the electric stuff in the next couple weeks.  We're looking to get this completed in about 3 weeks.  That is if I don't take a shotgun to myself by then.

I am hoping for things to get better.