Yesterday Neal Alger and I recorded the bass and guitar tracks to eight of my original songs at Handwritten Recordings studio in two and a half hours. A couple of songs we did in one take. I understand this is startlingly uncommon and efficient of us, but Neal and I have been playing most of these songs for several years, so it wasn’t surprising to me. We’re also not perfectionists who keep saying, “Let me just do that one more time.” If we liked the take, we called that song “done” and moved on.
On Monday I’ll go back and record the vocal tracks to those songs, probably in just a couple of hours. My voice is what it is and I’m not going to waste time trying to sound like Kelly Clarkson or Bonnie Raitt. I’m trying to sell the songs, not get some A&R executive to go, “What a great voice! I want to take this singer to the next level!” Over the next several months I’ll work on getting my voice more in shape and I can always re-record them later (when I sound more like Bonnie Raitt or Kelly Clarkson).
When these songs are done, I will have completed the first phase of my plan to earn money by selling my songs and/or getting tv and film placement deals. The next step (that I left out of my last post) is to get my music website back up so it’s promoting me properly. In the meantime, I have already been submitting songs to TAXI.com and will keep doing so.
And for those interested, yes, I will make these recordings available to the public as soon as I get them legally copyrighted. It’s time to stop giving this stuff away for free.