It Comes In Waves

January and February were good months for song writing. I wrote about twenty songs during that time. At one point I wrote and recorded one song each day for a week, which is a lot for me since I am generally not a very prolific writer. I'm often paranoid about losing song ideas, and because of my paranoia I have yet to completely finish a writing journal. I get about halfway through one and then I have to store it somewhere safe for fear of losing it. I think my fear stems from the reality that my inspiration comes in waves. Sometimes my life is filled with songs, and then other times it is painfully empty and devoid of inspiration. During the empty times everything I write seems cliche and I tend to wonder if the good songs will ever come back. I tend to doubt my ability to write anything substantial. This is the ultimate ego-shrinker.

For The Classic Crime's first record, Albatross, we wrote fourteen songs and kept twelve. For our acoustic EP we wrote and kept seven songs. For our last full length, The Silver Cord, we wrote fifteen tracks and put all fifteen tracks on the record. For many bands and producers, the idea of showing up to record an album with such a limited amount of material is ludicrous, but thats just the way we do things.

When inspiration hit in January, I felt like we could do things differently. I was writing daily and coming up with some fresh and exciting ideas. I had visions of writing forty-plus songs, and then picking the best songs of that bunch to record for our next release. I rode the wave until it crashed, as it always does. 

Through March and April I think I've written a total of five songs, two of which are full on acoustic, and one of which I can't even get motivated to record a demo for. I find myself sitting in front of my MacBook, which is sitting in front of my Digi002 console, which is sitting between my studio monitors, and I'm surfing Craigslist or Facebook or Twitter doing God-knows-what-else-is-meaningless. All the audio hardware stays off, just like my brain.

With any luck this lull is just the "wave" sucking itself out back to sea to form another breaker. I was blessed with one albums-worth of material out of the last wave, all of which sounds very cohesive and different. If I could get four complete waves, all sounding somewhat different, I think we could have a very interesting record ahead of us.

I'm just standing on the beach, waiting for the next wave to break. 

Meanwhile I'll sift through a few songs that the other guys have come up with and see if we can't build a nice sand-castle out of them.