Cover of Beta

I’ve been sitting on this music for a while, and decided to release it now as an EP.

It’s music I worked on while traveling, before I ended up in Berlin. I’m insanely proud of these songs, but they don’t really fit with anything I’m doing at the moment, so here they are.

More details at Bandcamp, where you can download it for free.

I present to you my new album, Solo Guitar 2009-2010: A Work in Progress. As you can probably tell, there’s only one song on it so far. But more will be added in the coming months.

Oh yeah, and it’s free to download. I just ask for your email in return so I can add you to my mailing list and keep you updated as I upload new songs. You can of course unsubscribe at any time.

For more on why I’m doing all this, check out this blog post.

That’s the other thing, I started a new blog seperate from this site over on Posterous. It’s just way easier to post over there and it just makes more sense that way.

Much more music coming soon. Stay tuned.

And you can check out some photos from my show at Cafe Lyrik on my Flickr page, can’t believe I forgot to post them here.

It went pretty well, although it’s always weird at these things with so much going on. My parents were in town, so they got to see me play, that was fun…

So now I’m focusing on Oct. 22 at Cafe Lyrik, and maybe finally sitting down and recording some of the new songs. More on that later.

Uploaded some pictures from last night’s gig at Alice Gryphius. Had a great time, looking forward to playing there again. Thanks to everyone who came.

You can view all the pics at Flickr.

But…with the unexpected slew of ideas comes the hard part: knowing when to accept that an idea just isn’t all that great. Sometimes, you know right away. Other times, and this is what’s been happening to me a lot lately, you come to realize it when you’ve already been working on a song for weeks, if not months.

I used to be quite ruthless about this, letting go of ideas no matter how hard I’d worked on them, confident that new and better ones would come along. But wanting to have a certain number of songs by a certain time made me lose focus. I kept fighting with ideas to make them work, even though I knew in my gut it was a hopeless battle…or worse, I tried to finish songs before they were ready, just so I would have “more songs.”

But enough of that. I’ve been playing and composing music long enough that I know when an idea isn’t working. When it’s good enough, I know because I have no doubt that it is. I know because I can practice and play it for hours without getting bored and still feel an emotional connection.

So from the new songs I’m working on, I have one or two that are definitely going into the trash bin, and a few others that need a closer look. And to tell you the truth, it’s actually quite a relief to let those songs go. Sure, there’s a small part of me that goes “but that chord change in that one song was soooo cool!”, but I’ve come to the conclusion that if those parts are really that cool, then they’ll surface again in the future. At least I hope so…

By itself it’s not that big a deal, really. It’s only 5 bucks and 15 minutes of your life. But having to do it regularly can get quite…annoying. Sometimes I envy our bass-playing brethren, who can go years without changing strings.

We aren’t so lucky. At most I can go a month without suffering too much. But if you’re gigging or recording on a regular basis, then changing at least every week is the norm. Otherwise the tone starts to suffer.

I don’t even want to think about how much money and time I’ve spent on strings in the 20 years I’ve been playing. But what really gets me is that every time I change them, I hurt myself in some way…a poke, a cut, a scrape. Look closely at that picture, it was taken this morning. Notice the band-aid?

But after the blood, pain and time wasted, I’m left with the guitar sounding better than ever, full of life and resonance. Is it worth all the hassle?

Totally.