Time Flowing Foreward, Time Flowing Backward

ALBANY, N.Y. - Sunlight pours through the thick glasses windows of Harith and Wendy's apartment. For the first time in over an hour, I move my sore bottom from the hard wooden chair and walk toward the couch. I went to the sleeping mass resting on top of the cushions, and started to shake it.

"Harith," I say. "Get up. Time to record vocals."

How did it come to this? Where did the time go? A little over a month ago, it seemed as if we unlimited time to complete a record. Writing a song a day seemed a breeze. What's a song, really? A few lyrics, maybe a bit of a melody. In my earliest musical entries, it seemed that even an idea counted as a song on the album.

I wrote about the genesis of a track called Ice Bear: "As a metaphor, I see the Ice Bear as coming through a traumatic experience enhanced by it, with an extra shell to weather future crisis. I hope that image will lead to a strong song." That's a fantastic image, but isn't a song.

I returned from Canada with a desire to finish "Ice Bear." I turned to Google, hoping to learn more information about the Inuit legend. I couldn't find anything, but I'm not sure whether that is because "ice" and "bear" are very common search terms, the Inuit refer to the animal as a similar but related word, or that I actually invented the Ice Bear long ago in a dream.

Next, I started constructed the music for the track. I knew that it would depend strongly on the low-end, since the bears are large, laborious animals, and the Arctic tundra emits a rumbling, ground-hugging wind. I borrowed a good microphone from Harith and hummed. I hummed one long note for as long as I could hold it, and then I push the record button and did it again. I made so many layers, but when I put it together it sounded terrible, like that sound that accompanies the cable's monthly test of the emergency broadcasting system. Things didn't work until I cut a small segment - half a second - out of one of the humming track, and then looped. Then I took three different segments and placed them on top of the loop. I played it back, and realized I'd captured the sound of the tundra. Satisfied, I closed the file, and made myself a cup of tea.

I hummed on the fifth day of the month, and felt so good about the track that I didn't even think about adding anything to it until three weeks later. Harith mentioned that his friend Jazz owned a didgeridoo, a long tube covered with beeswax on one end used by Australian aboriginals in religious rituals. Late one night, we went to his Clifton Park home and while I drank a Mike's Hard Lemonade, recorded several minutes of droning notes on a portable recorder. Satisfied, I turned off the recorder and went back to Albany.

Then it was the 29th of February. I woke up in Harith and Wendy's spare bedroom, where I'd temporarily moved to be closer to our recording studio. I opened the "Ice Bear," and found a few tracks of looped humming, and in another track, eight minutes of random low notes on the didgeridoo. On the side of the monitor I saw a piece of paper with some lyrics scribbled on the side. My e-mail inbox contained the link to some throat singing from the Siberian area of Tuva. I had many things; but not a song.

"Ice Bear" is a pretty good representation of this entire record. We worked intermittently for four weeks on the project, taking time out to see our families, to travel to foreign countries and visit bars. Ideas gestated and developed, but we didn't have "songs" until the last couple days, when pressed by the challenge deadline, we sat down and finished them. It wasn't a terribly pleasant process -- our final recording session stretched on for over 20 hours -- but in the end we have a record I'm proud of.

Since in the crush of making the album, I didn't have time to write about the process here, I'll be spending the rest of March telling more stories from the making of "Good Day Monster." I'll be breaking in from time to time to more about current activities with the band, as we get ready to put the record for sale and do a couple things with the music we created. Watch this space.

[ A bit of a side note: The title of this post is a song title that I never got around to using while making the record. I imagined it as a song that uses both forward and backward elements, or perhaps a song that plays in its entirety forward, and then goes backwards. Really, it's just a reference to "Lost."]

Good Day Monster

ALBANY, N.Y. - It's March, and as promised, we have a record.

Finished with very little time to spare, "Good Day Monster," is now on its way to the headquarters of the RPM Challenge in New Hampshire. Right now I've got very little perspective, having just spent the last 48 hours or so squirrled away trying to finish this thing, but I must say that I'm proud of the record. I'm sure it won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I think we captured the sound we were trying to record here. There are some quite conventional songs, and a few pieces that are really, really out there.

Here's the cover art and track list:



1. On Day One
2. Palindromes
3. Roman Numeral Forty-Two
4. Cascades
5. Björnsong
6. Obamalabama
7. Jöshsong
8. Before I Was An Uptight Accoutnant
9. Morose Cat
10. Personal Assistant
11. The Electric Shock
12. Ice Bear

You can hear music from the record in a couple different ways:

1. The Rev Records will be selling the record online for the low price of $5, plus a couple more bucks for shipping. The Rev is an Albany based record label my friend Harith started a few years back, and has released some solid music. It should be available on the site by the end of next week. I'll update the blog if that changes.

2. I've started a Facebook Fan page for the Troupe. I'm glad there's an easy to use alternative to the seizure inducing flashing pages over at MySpace. We setup a small page here with album art and three MP3s from the album.

Happy listening!

Even More

ALBANY, N.Y. - We are in crunch mode here, furiously burning megabytes of data in our quest to get everything down before the Friday deadline.

I have a couple of pieces about the recording process partially written, but the actual music making (and non-creative endeavors, including traveling) have taken precedent the past few days.

I wanted to post, as a bit of a teaser, a few new tracks that have developed since I last revealed the tentative track list.

Cascades

Girl Scout Pariah

Morose Cat

Obamalamba

Personal Assistant

With so many tracks, it's pretty imperative that I get back to beat making. But before I do, I have a bit of sad news to share. A couple of tracks won't be making the journey all the way to CD. Please take a moment to mourn the following causalities:

In Siberia
Needs too much structural work; and requires complicated harmonizing and instrumentation. Being saved for a future project.

This One's For The Cats
Replaced by a similar cat song

The Josh Dilemma

ALBANY, N.Y. - Great albums are more than a collection of catchy tunes, there is a force that unites the tracks and turns it into one memorable product. I don't think anyone here is trying to make a great record, but we'd like to get above terrible. In that spirit, we've been kicking around a couple ideas for album themes/concepts in the past couple weeks.

After writing a couple tracks, I suggested "cold." One song is called "Ice Bear" and there's another one about Winter In Siberia. We're recording during a very messy February. The last two nights I've been afraid to drive after dark, as the streets are a patchwork of black ice, slush and frozen cookies of hard snow. Every morning I don't want to get out of bed and brave the house set a nighttime thermostat setting. Cold seems like an appropriate way to describe the settings under which this album was recorded.

Unfortunately - or perhaps fortunately - we all were not in a cold mood when writing songs. The album will include a track about "Partying Like a Rock Star" and another one where cats play the keyboard. That doesn't have much to do with the weather.

I believe Harith hit on the actual theme when he told Joe, his upstairs neighbor and banjo player, the album would be "everything we have done in the past, but more musical." That statements squares nicely with the track's we've written, with include a glitchy electronic instrumental, some drone, some nonsensical party tracks and an acoustic song or two. All of these have figured on records in the past: the electronics on The Liberal Arts, the acoustic material on b.c. bistro, the drone on Tronto. Hopefully this time we can touch on these areas with a bit more emphasis on melody, tempo and pacing than in the past.

Our most vexing motif is Josh. Josh currently is in his third year of post-graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. His research focuses on religious schools established on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao during the U.S. occupation of the island in the early twentieth century (and comparing these schools to those created by the Netherlands in nearby Indonesia). Long ago, he puffed away on the french horn in the Colonie Central High School orchestra, but otherwise has no musical experience. Born an academic, Josh is fond of ten dollar adjectives and sweater vests. He is not a natural musical virtuoso.

But talent, for better or worse, has never been a requirement to participate in 00Shoe Troupe recordings. Josh appears on four albums, The 33 Tape, b.c. bistro, Transit and Tronto. On the first record, he tries to name an animal that starts with every letter of the alphabet over synthesized vibraphone and orchestra samples. He provided the vocals for our most (in)famous recording, "The Arabs." At the beginning, Josh declares, "Tons and tons of Jewish people!" and then mutters about the United States of America and Indonesia for the next three minutes. Basically, the formula with Josh is to trick him into saying rather ridiculous things into the microphone, cut it up and paste it liberally onto a beat.

Fortuitously, the soon-to-be-married Josh scheduled a trip home during February to a buy a suit, eat tapas and watch French movies with his family. Harith and I decided to get some tape during the weekend for use on the album. But how to work Josh into our new, more musical approach? We couldn't have him sing nor could we have him play his long sold horn. There would have to be some kind of spoken word. I suggested a short story, but Harith, asutely pointed out that neither him nor I had a suitable tale in the vault and our newfound respect for copyrights (the result of Harith now running a legit record label, The Rev Records) prevented using the work of Philip Roth, Dave Eggers, or another published author. We decided on reading a travel adventure from this blog.

Sunday afternoon, as I agonized over which entry to choose, Josh and parents decided to watch Paris, Je T'aime. I arrived to watch the last several pieces of the anthology, most memorable a piece where Elijah Wood turns into a werewolf with purple Day-Glo eyes. After the movie finished, it was time to record. But the French and their lengthy, arty film left Josh just a few minutes at the microphone before his return flight. Panicking, I had Josh say a few biographical details and a describe a picture from my Mongolian adventures, gave him a hug, and sent him on his way.

A couple nights later, I started fiddling with the tapes. I didn't have too much dialogue - not enough to just play it continously over a track. For better or worse, Josh's track on the record will be another experiment with cut and paste. An hour or so into mixing and remixing, I decided this track would better previous Josh creations by being constructed entirely out of his voice. It's a risky move, as I won't have drum machines or guitars to rely on if I can't find enough weird sounds in the track.

I've made two mixes of the song so far, and sent them onto Harith for critique. He had plenty of helpful suggestions - which loop to bring up, when to bring in an element hard rather than using a fade, and what stuff simply had to go. After a little more studio surgery, perhaps I will figure out a way to make Josh musical after all.

Monster

ALBANY, N.Y. - Here's the first draft of the album's cover art. Harith made it and sent it over with a question about the Chinese character in the center. This particular character won't be appearing in the finished product for reasons I won't go into now. I'll explain the album art when we have a final image, but for now, enjoy this picture:

Progress, Day 12

ALBANY, N.Y. - After a couple days moping around, worrying that the album won't be ready on time, I decided to stop worrying and start list making.

As I explained in a previous update, I love to quantify. The best part - well, maybe one of the best parts - of the album making process is when there are enough songs that I can place them in a list, a snapshot of where we are on that particular day. There are dozens of these lists from previous records, and some from records never made.

In my e-mail account there's an message sent from Harith describing a record called "Something We Do Not Know," with tracks including "Edamame Everyman" and "Zombies Were People Too." Alas, we never got around to putting down a single note for that album, although it sure was fun coming up with the song titles.

This album, thankfully, has made it past the conceptual stage. We know have parts of several songs recorded, and in a couple cases, something close to a final mix. To get a snapshot of exactly where we are on the record, and how far we have to go, I made a list this evening and sent it off to Harith for comment. I haven't heard back from him yet, but I offer the list here as a glimpse into my/our creative and quantitative process.

on day one
written, no recording. needs distorted piano/guitar, several singers

plars
written, no recording. needs electric guitar, hand percussion and drum machine.

in siberia
partially written. needs hand percussion, electronics and banjo?

josh takes the mic
recording in progress... may need accordion

mostly red
aka 'the communist marching song'
melody complete, no lyrics yet. needs electric piano, shoes

roman numeral 42
recording in progress

palindromes
written, no recording. needs Casio keyboard, clarinet, robot voice.

the electric shock
recorded. needs minor alterations to mix.

ice bear
partially written. needs acoustic guitar

this one's for the cats
electronic song based on keyboard played by cats. needs to be mixed

Producing Like a Rock Star

CLIFTON PARK, N.Y. - Mahar's at six o'clock on a Friday afternoon is a mass of graduate students from the nearby College of St. Rose, paralegals from local law firms and mid-level state bureaucrats, all ready to wash the week away with a couple of imported pints. The crowd is so deep that it take me a few minutes after entering to locate Wendy and her pink-and-purple boots. After standard greetings, Wendy announced a bit of news.

"I have a new song idea," she said, and then started to sing.

"PLARS: Party Like A Rock Star. PLARS: Party Like a Rock Star. PLARS: Party Like a Rock Star."

Wendy already had a blueprint for the song: vocal refrain set to mantra-like repetition, a chugging techno drum progression, and funky wah-wah electric guitar. She described it as a "Daft Punk style dance song." It sounded perfect: this album needs a bit of levity and partying like a rock star is a great mood enhancer.

We now have another track for the album, another track that isn't recorded. When this month began I worried that we wouldn't have enough material to complete the record in a month. The RPM Challenge encourages participants to not only produce 10 songs in a month, but also to write and arrange them in that period as well. Since we haven't recorded a note in three years, there wasn't any songs lying around at the month to use, so pre-writing was not much of an issue. As the days in February slowly tick by, we now have enough ideas to fill out a tracklist: "Ice Bear," "Plars," "Swedish Cat," and several other tunes.

But with one-third of the challenge elapsed, we've done precious little recording. I've done "The Electric Spark," made a stab at recording the copyright-violating "Swedish Cat," and programmed a couple skeletal beats. However, there has been no progress in putting any of the more complicated pieces to tape, including several songs that on which we hope to include ample live instrumentation. Many of these instruments (banjo, accordion, amplified electric piano) will need to be played by other people, as my finger plucking and strumming abilities are quite limited.

The Troupe might be many things, but a traditional band we are not. We can't all just pick up our respective instruments, press record, do a couple takes and have an album track. Instead, shoes need to be miced and then re-miced, clicks have to looped, echoed and reverbed to sound correctly, and anyone outside the band has to figure out how to add a part when we frequently have neither chords nor a melody to work with.

My growing concern that we won't be able to execute this record is manifesting in strange ways. During a conversation at the bar yesterday evening, I asked a high school classmate who I hadn't seen if two years if she wanted to "be my Ashanti" (ie, sing a vocal hook on one of the songs). A little while later I debated the meaning of dreams with a paralegal, all while wondering if I might have dreamed a profound set of lyrics in the past couple weeks. Unfortunately, I could only remember piloting a train into a tree, diverting a road trip to ensure I visited Nebraska and making friends with a talking elk, none of which jump out as excellent song topics.

Right now, we can definitely still finish. Our challenge for the next couple weeks will be taking the quirky and fun ideas and turning into completed sound recordings. For ideas, no matter how good they may be, cannot yet be uploaded to an iPod Nano.

The Girl From Ipanema

ALBANY, N.Y. - Noam Chompsky believes in universal grammar, a limited set of rules that all humans use to organize language. If Chompsky's theory is true - and many people smarter than are convinced it is - I think there must also be a universal grammar of music. This grammar comes with our genetic code; it is something that we receive at conception. How else to explain how I managed to write "The Girl From Ipanema," despite never once hearing the tune?

Harith, Wendy and I ate dinner together Wednesday evening at their downtown Albany apartment. They live in the downstairs of a brick house built during the Civil War, a cozy place with low ceilings and warm, incandescent lighting. It's a nice place to work on music, a refreshing change from the many afternoons and evenings during high school in the windowless basement of Harith's childhood home pounding away at beats. As Harith made pasta with olive oil and shrimp pesto in the kitchen, I began to fiddle with a Casio Keyboard in the living room.

Things progressed slowly, as, to quote William Hung, "I have no formal training." I compose by pressing the keys in different combinations until something vaguely musical comes out. Then I try to remember, rejigger, and repeat that loop before I slip into another atonal set of notes. On Wednesday it did not take long before I had a nice little melody, four quarter notes repeated three times, then a final note a little further down the keyboard (Harith, popping out of the kitchen while the water boiled, astutely suggested that last note).

It was a lovely little ditty, pleasant even. A much better result than my last attempt at writing a song, which resulted in a mess of chopped up static looping endlessly through my second-rate Logitech computer speakers. Sitting on the Abdullah-Cullings couch, soothed by a successful dip into my brain's abbesses, I kept playing my new tune endlessly and humming along. Snuggled beside my right thigh was Bjorn, aka The Swedish Cat. Bjorn, a petite tabby with a bushy tail of charcoal-hued fur, is my favorite of Harith and Wendy's four cats. Soon I started improvising lyrics: Yes, I love you/ Yes, I love you/ Yes, I love you cat. By the end of dinner, I'd decided to add the Casio's preset "bossa-nova" drumbeat and rap in the third-person about my adoration for the Nordic feline, feeling well on the way toward making an album track.

Unfortunately, my decision to include a bossa-nova drum pattern foreshadowing trouble to come. Wendy, in the middle of an old New York Times crossword and the eighth audition American Idol audition episode, made a comment during a commercial.

"That sounds like 'The Girl From Ipanema," she said, and Harith agreed.

"You just wrote 'The Girl From Ipanema," he said.

I couldn't accept that my random melody is already a known song, so I pressed for information that would allow the tune now known as "Swedish Cat" live on. I turned to Joe, a banjo player who lives in the upstairs apartment. Then I asked his wife and accordionist Melissa, walking in the door from Justin's, a jazz club.

"I'm going to play you a melody," I said. "Let me know if it reminds you of any songs that you know." My fingers went over the keys, pressing high C, high A, high A and then middle G. After I hit that fourth note, Melissa blurted out the right tune.

Apparently "The Girl From Ipanema," is in my cultural blind spot. I read online that the song is a considered a bossa-nova and elevator music classic. After watching 40-year-old performance clips on You Tube, I'll admit that it's a catchy little ditty. I only wish I'd written it first.

Staying on Track

ALBANY, N.Y. - This evening, home from a weekend in Canada, I decided to get serious about this whole recording an album in a month thing.

Sure, I've been "conceptualizing," "pre-recording," and "formulating" songs for the past several days, but until now there's been not a byte of data recorded. And with just 25 days left, that's not acceptable.

I logged off Instant Messanger and Google Chat, closed all my in progress games of Scrablous and put my phone on vibrate. I shut every program on the computer except Abode Audition, a sound recorder and mixer. I opened up a new session and then waited for inspiration to strike.

Suddenly, a lovely little melody popped into my head. It wasn't much, just four bars that moved up and down, but it had a nice progression. I moved quickly, steadying the $5 microphone (all the expensive equipment is at Harith's apartment) and then hitting the red record button. The humming came out of my head and into the air, sounding a bit tentative, but still recongizable. As I sang, the song grew bigger. I could hear chanting and counter-melodies running beside the melody; a full-blown song was emerging in my head.

I decided to best thing to do would be to add some lyrics the basic melody. I went to the dining room table with a black Sharpie and a blank piece of printer paper, and again waited for creativity. A few words came:

First, I
I must confess
I, I have not done this
In quite some time.

I wrote about writing. How fascinating. (I suppose that makes this writing about writing about writing. Even better.)

Frustrated, I returned to my monitor. I saw my few hummed bars represented as a jagged green sound wave on the screen. I zoomed in on different parts, examining the curves and the splines for an appealing pattern, a new focus.

Two hours later, I closed that session file with a complete song. It's called "The Electric Shock," and features neither humming, counter-melodies or lyrics about writing. It is a minute sample of that humming, looped and cut up thousands of different times, spread across 18 layers and then mixed into two channels.

Things often work out this way. I start one project in a mad rush of inspiration, and then something happens and just as quickly I set off on a completely different path. In some parts of life, it's not a terribly healthy way to work. Here, well, I have a finished song, don't I?

Ice Bear

LONGUEUIL, Canada – I believe good song writing, like any type of good writing, is filled with strong imagery.

The successful song paints a picture. It might be clear or abstract, verbose or spare, but it describes the world in a way that only that one person can.

A performer with a fantastic point of view is Bjôrk. I'm not sure whether it's her Icelandic background, interest in shamanism and spirits or love of word music, but it's hard to mistake Bjork's writing for someone else. An example that pops into my head is "Unison," a song about finding living with a romantic partner. "You gardener/ You discpliner/ Domestically/ I can obey all of your rules/ and still be." Despite using just 15 words, I can picture this man: stern, hard-working, but inside a big softie.

I'm not much of a writer. Our albums featured mostly patched-together songs that evolved from a drum beat or piano line. Lyrics, when used, were usually stream of consciousness or nonsense words. But every album, I inevitably would get the urge to try and compose a "real song," lyrics and all. The same is true on this record.

On the way back from Montréal, I started seriously thinking about images for songs. A shopping mall? No, too vague. My lost wisdom tooth? Too literal. A road sign that "arrete" instead of stop? Not even sure where to begin.

Then, from some recess deep in my brain, it came: The Ice Bear. From what I remember, the Ice Bear is the most terrifying animal in the Arctic. The Inuit revere the Ice Bear, as it can kill even the strongest tribe member with little effort. They pray to the spirits that the bear will protect the community, and that will not incur the fearsome creature's wrath.

An Ice Bear is a polar bar, that after swimming through the frigid sea, takes a stroll onto the windy Arctic plain. The winds instantenously turn the water on the bear's fur to ice, forming a thick crunchy epidermal layer. The ice is so thick that the Inuit's arrows cannot penetrate, and the already impressive bear becomes invincible.

As a metaphor, I see the Ice Bear as coming through a traumatic experience enhanced by it, with an extra shell to whether future crisis. I hope that image will lead to a strong song.

Counting the Songs

MONTRÉAL – If someone from the media – and this assumptions presumes a level of notoriety I almost certain will never attain – asked for a soundbite on why I decided to participate in the RPM Challenge, something to fill a few seconds on the 6 o'clock news, I could answer.

Harith, the other guy in the band and my long-time friend asked, and he's rarely steered me wrong in the past.

But after the camera stopped rolling and the reporter put away their notebook, my mind would inevitably wander to another, more complicated reason for my participation: I quantify everything.

I know the commute time to work down to the minute: nine on a good day, 13 if I miss most of the lights. On the treadmill I decide in advance how long will I jog (30 minutes) at what speed (6.4 miles per hour) and at what incline (five minutes at 7 percent grade, the rest level). At night, I frequently allow myself four ounces of potato chips before bed (although since New Year's, I am aiming for just three).

This obsession with digits began early childhood, when at the age of 3 years, 8 months, I demanded from my parents a wristwatch. They demurred, and said I could have a watch only when I learned how to tell time. I won the argument: a few days later I wore a watch to preschool, and started reminding my instructors when nap time finished and recess began.

Sometime in my adolescence, I put mathematics aside. I discovered reading, and most importantly of all, writing. A couple weeks ago, I rummaged through a long-forgotten drawer in the desk of my childhood home. Instead of my birth certificate, I found old compositions from middle and high school and reread them. Despite the predictably sophomoric syntax, I could that these some of these compositions inspired my younger self. I contend that writing a Victorian Christmas Story is more interesting than solving Euclidian proofs. Eventually I left New York for a liberal arts school, majored in politics and started working as a reporter.

But I have found it is impossible to completely erase the digits from my life. I might work in words, but I think in numbers. This means I need concrete data, measurable goal-posts, even in a nebulous area.

For my music, this has meant that I can only really operate in the confines of a project, with a definable beginning, middle and end. I can't, as some of my friends do, write a song, and then another as inspiration comes, accumulating tracks for an undefined purpose. I need a deadline, and since there's no label breathing down my neck for the next release from an Albany-based electronic-folk collective, I used to create them. Finish the album by February 1; write two songs by the end of the week; fix the bass on that track before going to the movies.

The past few years school, work and travel have taken priority over the band. But since unforeseen circumstances have brought us to the same town unexpectedly, I believe it's time to pick up the microphone again. Thank God for the RPM Challenge for imposing a deadline and making sure I can quantify my way to a finished product once again.

Put the Needle On It

MONTRÉAL – Over the past two and a half months, I have travelled from Lativa to Mongolia, all while never leaving the American Northeast. I nostalgia blogged, describing adventures not as they happened, but with a fair bit of distance from them. While I enjoyed it, I think it's time for a change.

I write this on a Greyhound Bus crossing the Champlain Bridge on the St. Lawrence River, just about to descend into the city of Montréal. Normally I would be prepping an entry about the inquisitive customs agent who nearly caught me in a lie or Québec's strange obsession with the comma, but not today. I figure this change of venue is as good a time as any to unveil my new project: the RPM Challenge.

The RPM Challenge is a challenge to all musicians to record an album in the month of February. The project, which is based on the honor system, encourages procrastinating artists to get off their behinds and make something under deadline. Ever since I've returned to the States, my friend Hairth has been talking about the challenge as a way to revive our moribund musical output, and join the 800 or so other groups that hopefully will produce a record by March 1.

I'll be posting some introductory thoughts on our band and making an album in my next post, but here I want to let my reading public (both of you) know that I'm going to blogging about the experience here at Mostly Red for the next month. Succeed or fail, I hope to at least produce some memorable prose along with the music.

I will be cross-posting these entries on our band's RPM Challenge Blog, which can be found at http://www.rpmchallenge.com. Harith will also be sharing his thoughts, frustrations and epiphanies during the album making process, so I suggest clicking over there for an alternative perspective.

I hope you enjoy this formatting change – I personally am looking forward to doing something different – but if you don't, fear not: There are still more Mongolian stories, which should continue in March.