Those of you who know me – and let’s face it, I think that’s everyone reading this at this point – may be wondering, “Where are the EP updates? I thought you were making an EP. Aren’t you working on that right now? How is it going?” and similar.
The answer is, I suppose, that it is going amazingly, fantastically well, it’s better than I’d even dreamed, I’m so excited about this project, and… I don’t really want to talk about it.
I’m not overly superstitious, as a rule. In fact I may be a little below the species average as far as superstition goes. But what I am is desperately averse to being proven wrong about that which I say with certainty. And it’s been a great many years since I was able to trust my memory on just about anything.
In this stage of my life, I make an attempt to use qualifiers around things that I’m pretty sure are right just in case they turn out not to be. “I think it was something about,” “I heard the other day that,” “I understood they had tried to,” anything to give the listener’s brain a hint that I’m not a reliable source.
When subjects I’m especially passionate about (music, psychology, Discworld, Sailor Moon, etc.) come up, I may just clam up entirely about the details lest I spout some fact that has been corrupted in my too-fallible information storage system. Or I’ll quickly Google it and then use the same “this could be wrong” qualifiers as I would if it were any other topic.
So how does this connect to the EP? I guess it’s that it’s definitely something I’m passionate about. If you do manage to get me talking about it, well, it may be difficult to get me to stop. And by the time I do stop, who knows how many wrong things I may have let slip out without the appropriate warning labels?
A very long time ago,1 I expressed the idea that we were increasingly storing our knowledge online instead of in our heads. There was coming to be so much more data than a person could reasonably expect to store in a single brain, so we put the stuff we didn’t need on a regular basis somewhere that it’s accessible at need but doesn’t overburden our minds. I was sure it was a fixed course we were on, though I can’t recall whether I thought it was a good thing or a bad thing. I can recall, of course, that I was ridiculed because… well, I guess because I said something like that in high school around the turn of the millennium.
Since (also) a very long time ago, my mind has been a big muddled. In grade 3 I memorized so many poems that the teacher ran out of the prizes she traditionally gave for such feats of memory. Less than a decade later, I flubbed a Drama final by forgetting half my monologue. Another decade and a half (or so) after that, I forgot my own lyrics mid-performance, after having an anxious response to the audience reaction to the song. It feels like the more I try to store the more I have to look to external storage solutions. They say, of course, that your memory stops working as well as you get older, but somehow I never expected that to mean in high school. Or even in my thirties.
So, once again, we circle back to the EP.
I’m not afraid that talking about how well the project is going will somehow jinx it. I don’t think you can do that. I’m afraid that if I talk about how well it’s going, and then it turns out less good than I’ve made it sound, I’ll look like I don’t actually know anything about music. I’m afraid that if I get talking about this, this years-in-the-making project that means so very much to me, I’ll say something stupid that reflects how I hold space for a fact in my head without reflecting the actual fact itself. I’m afraid I’ll put something in print that doesn’t match up to the reality of the thing. So here, below, are a few well-thought-out points that I hope will represent an acceptable update on the EP.
I’m so happy with the songs we settled on. I’ve written a lot of songs in the last few years, but I think these five are some of the best. I haven’t gotten sick of them,2 even listening to them over and over and over again to critique my own vocals, which is truly amazing to me.
I’m so happy with the way the songs fit together to form a cohesive whole. They are all five so different, I hope that everyone who bothers to listen will find something that they like. But they also all come from aspects of my way of thinking and so, in the same way that my mind fits together despite some surprising divergences, the songs fit together.
I’m so happy with the producer, recommended by my voice teacher. He is really, really awesome. I’ve promised to write him an epic testimonial at the end of all this. I feel like we have an excellent working relationship, he listens to me, and he somehow manages to suggest things in a way that doesn’t leave me feeling defensive so I can appraise the suggestions rationally, and we make decisions together, the three of us. I feel like we really got lucky here.
I’m so happy with the session musicians. Recommended by the producer, just really excellent musicians, and their contributions to the songs are exactly what we need.
I’m so happy, perhaps shockingly, with how my voice sounds on the tracks. I have a very hard time liking my voice. But somewhere between the fancy microphone, the recording process, and the producer’s expert editing (that doesn’t leave my voice sounding like it’s not my voice) I’m finding myself overwhelmingly pleased.
I’m so happy with the overall quality of what we are doing. It’s so many steps above what I thought we’d be turning out when I first conceived of this project.
I’m so happy that we’re doing this at all. In Reaper Man, Terry Pratchett said that “no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away – until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.” From the beginning, I’ve intended to make ripples with this EP. And magically, I feel like I just might.
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1 High school, okay? It was in high school.
2 Yet.