Just 5 days ago I completed my first seriously recorded song. Today I have half an album.

I have to give myself a pat on the back. I made a very good plan before I started recording and I’ve been putting in the work so everything is coming together even more quickly than I thought it would.

There are logistics to getting this done and I’ve put those logistics first which was a good decision.

Night time and weekends are hard to record vocals cause neighbors are home

Some days we need to match our schedules.

Bass requires more practice because I’m writing the bass lines right before I record.

And so weekdays in the daytime I record main guitar and vocals.

Nighttime and weekends I record extra guitar and bass.

I started with one of the hardest songs first and did the hard part for a few other songs in the same week.

I split the songs into three sets of three to make it feel less daunting.

Everything is coming together.

I have to finish bass on one track and then the album is half finished. Yesterday I started writing it and today I will see if I’m ready to record it. If not I’ll have to practice through the weekend.

Either way I hope to get to work on the next song today.

It will be a vocal only track but one with many layers and some tricky recording maneuvers to get the sound I’m going for. I expect it to be a fairly quick song to record though. I don’t need to demo it because I’ve actually recorded a rough version of it before.

If things go well I’ll be able to start work on the 6th song tomorrow. The 6th song is darker than anything we’ve recorded so far and it’s the least mature song out of the bunch besides the last song we will record. We’ve never played it live so it may need a little extra practice but it’s a fairly simple song.

From there I can start work on the final song we plan to record (aside from an interlude or two).

How did this happen? It’s so close!

I had planned to finish recording by October 1st but it’s not even August yet and an end is in sight!

I think another smart thing I did was make the goal very reasonable. I gave myself a total of six months to put together the album after most of the songs were written (at least on guitar and vocals). I thought work would get in the way but my workload has been pretty sparse this summer, so in the end I was able to do much more in a much shorter time than I expected.

I am not sure if release will come any sooner because we need some secondary mixing from a friend, so it will depend on their schedule , but that’s really it.

I am thinking about moving the deadline for recording completion from October 1st to September 1st. That way I can get back to work on some other projects.

I already have new songs I want to start work on and since yesterday I’ve been thinking about finishing Confessions of the Damaged 1.4 and 1.5 to complete the story.

Over the past few weeks some very difficult news came out and it got me all tied up in complicated emotions. Things I want to say that are too nuanced to do in a tweet and too valuable to let sit in a feed where it will be washed out in days.

The event itself caused me to face some of my own experiences from a new angle and that gave rise to an ending to the story which I hadn’t been confident about before. Now it feels clear as day.

We have a show coming up the last week of August. It would be really nice to get everything ready by then.

Late August
-finish album

• one show

September

• Single release
• 3-4 shows

October

• Album release
• 3-4 shows

November

• make some collaborations with other bands
• start writing new book
• start planning more shows outside Tokyo/Japan for Winter/Spring

December

• physical CD
• small Japan tour?

I’m liking this plan a lot. It’s quite ambitious but not unrealistic. Worst case scenario I will push things back by a month or two, but I think I will stick with this!

I + Everything Live - Water and Air

I+Everything