I’m sitting on the couch with my laptop, watching the sheer joy on my son’s face as he, plastic sword in hand, copies the moves of his hero on the television. It’s pretty ironic that Edgar’s favorite cartoon is the same as mine when I was a kid. I think I was a little older—maybe five or six.
Saturday night, we took a look at the calendar and realized that, unsurprisingly, my six weeks at home are nearly at an end. With a trip to the coast planned for week-after-next, this is shaping up to be my last week at home. Jen and I both came to the realization that we should be treating this like a vacation—that we should be taking full advantage of every weekday that I get at home. We’re working on tentative ideas for what to do each day, but it looks like all action, all of the time. Just how I like it. Well, I guess that since Jen is recovered, and Sabrina is nearly a month old, it’s now time to play.
We talked about ideas for our album art and why it’s taking us so long. For those of you following along at home, Jen and I are in a band together. We are vinyl fans, and released our first two songs on a 45 RPM record two years ago. We’ve had our first full-length album finished and ready for almost a year now. All that needs to be done is to get the record mastered. Once the record is mastered, we need to immediately press it and put it in sleeves. So, our next step is to do the dual step of creating and readying album art and sending our ¼” reel-to-reel mixed recordings to a mastering house.
Why have we taken so long? Part of it is the inevitable changing of priorities that comes with having two kids. Part of it is the relative difficulty of recording/mixing/mastering a record 100% analog in a digital world. Part of it is the lack of record label support, but many bands release records without a label. Another large part of it is the fact that nobody actually listens to our band. That’s a hard thing to admit, but there are very, very few people who listen to our music who aren’t in some way friends or family who are obligated to say they like it. We pressed 500 copies of our 7” (a common minimum), and we probably gave away 40 and sold 10. The rest are living in our apartment and my old closet at my parents’ house. It’s not too appealing to spend a bunch of money to press our album knowing we’ll never come close to recouping it, and that we’ll have boxes and boxes of records in our attic for the rest of our lives. Regardless, we want to do it. It’s a work of art and a labor of love. We’re really proud of the music, and proud that we did it the right way, and didn’t take many shortcuts in making this record. If nobody else likes our music, at least we like it. Hopefully, it will be something that we’ll be proud of for the rest of our lives.
So—we had a discussion on art direction for the album. I came to the conclusion that I like the art from our 7”, and if we like the art, we should keep the same artist/photographer/art director. [Jen painted the watercolor and I took the picture and did layout]. I’m leaning toward some large-scale nature/landscape photographs as an album cover, in keeping with the coastal/wilderness look we did on the back of our 7”. Here are some albums I am thinking of making it look like here and here. I’d like to scour our personal photo collection for potential album covers, but I’m not sure I won’t run into pixellization/DPI issues blowing a snapshot up to 12x12. I may consider leaning on Danita and seeing what she has available, too. Katie next door has done some art for us, too, which I haven’t seen yet, but I’m not sure it lines up with that theme (but I’m not sure it doesn’t, yet, either). It might work well as side A/side B record labels, too. Why am I putting all this on my blog? I want to keep myself honest and maybe remind myself to actually do what we planned.
Later last night, I decided that if I wasn’t sleepy, I should plan for my Primary lesson tomorrow. I’m glad I did, as it was pretty involved. Sunday morning was a bit crazy. Edgar was watching He-man. We’ve watched so much He-man over the last week or so that the incidental background music for the show is constantly stuck in our heads. It’s more than a little funny. I regret getting Edgar so hooked on television, but the feedback I’ve heard from lots of parents is that this is just what happens when a new baby is born, and it goes away eventually (probably with the advent of good weather).
We (again) attempted to get Edgar to take a nap before our 12:30 church, and (again) couldn’t get him to go to sleep until it was too late to leave. We (again) missed the first hour. Maybe one of these weeks, we’ll learn. There were a lot of very cute moments singing with the kids. One of which was that one of our little 3-year old Sunbeams was asked what her favorite primary song was. Her response was the new song we’ve been working on this month. That made me melt just a little. It’s nice to know I’ve had an influence, no matter how small.
After church, we trucked up to my parents’ house, without stopping at home. We managed to catch the second half of the super bowl, and hang out with family. Edgar sure loves being around lots of family. He’s really comfortable with the chaos that comes from having a sizable extended family around.
We got home from my parents’, put Edgar to bed, and did some more planning for the next week. We’ve got some great ideas lined up now.
Last night was interesting. Here’s how it went down: We brought Sabrina in from the car, asleep in her carseat. By 11 PM, Jen convinced me that Sabrina had already slept for 2 and a half hours and she would be fussing and waking up momentarily, but if she didn’t wake right up, we could get a level of Super Mario in. She didn’t wake up. We played some more. She didn’t wake up. We played some more. She didn’t wake up. We got stuck on a really hard level and kept trying and trying and trying and trying and before we knew it, it was 1:45 AM and Sabrina was still asleep in the carseat. At that point, we gave up and went to sleep.
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