take one, rolling...

now playing: dolly varden, "i come to you"

(this is a great record, by the way...you should check them out.)

so this morning, at around 2:20am, i declared the studio officially "done".

i still have some room for expansion, which i'll need, and i actually had a few cables left over once everything was patched together. after i hit the power for everything and made sure that everything powered up, and that all the lights lit and that nothing was missed, i just kinda sat there for a couple of minutes and took it all in...felt good.

nice to actually have a sense of accomplishment where something is concerned...work right now is essentially an endless stream of half-finished long-term projects that are constantly interrupted by short-term emergencies. nothing ever seems to be completely finished, something's always hanging in limbo...

...i hate it when it seems like i'm not getting anything done.

i did, however, give my "comments" feature a facelift yesterday - needed some instant gratification.

during the course of the studio rennovations, i unearthed a huge stack of old notebooks, legal pads, and folders containing snippets of song lyrics and ideas that were in a drawer for i-don't-even-know-how-long. being of the easily-derailed persuasion, i sat down and read through them for fifteen or twenty minutes and found a couple of zingers in there.

it's funny, but when i write (wrote?), i never really gave a great deal of thought to how my words would read at any point down the line...but it was pretty apparent, last night as i read my own words from some years back, just how much of a "time capsule" i managed to create, in terms of documenting where i was when i wrote some of those words.

i found a lot of drafts of songs, as well...i found the original draft of "brand new distance" (the leadoff track from "our mutual angels") that contained this later-omitted verse:

we all have to sacrifice
but it's a lonely price we've paid
cutting our dreams down to size
to fit into this life we've made

that sentiment, in and of itself, kinda perpetuated another entire song that ended up on the record, but the verse was cut for brevitys' sake, as opposed to any thought that was given to repetition of content.

blake went home with a big, steaming pile of old demos and recordings the last time he was over, and we were talking about some of them yesterday...some of the stuff that todd and i did in the living room on belvedere avenue and some tapes from room and gig recordings from ten years ago, if not more...god only knows what the hell was in there.

i do think, though, that after i get a chance to test everything tonight and make sure that all the miles of cable that i ran over the last couple of weeks is intact and functional, i'm going to master some of that stuff into digital form. i do want to keep some of it, even if it is essentially meaningless to the rest of the world.

among things to do today: call charlie and find out what's going on with him...haven't heard a peep from him in a month or so. also need to find out if this jodi project is gonna get off the ground or not.