Updates
I got back from Denver very late last night, and boy were my arms tired. And legs. And body.
Lesson learned: if you have the option to take a much earlier flight and it only costs $50, take it. That is much better than wandering around the Denver airport for 8 hours. Or, failing that, the $79 to get an admiral lounge day pass isn’t really all that bad either.
Anyway. Today was mostly a day of recuperation, and I was in extreme pain in my back and right shoulder. I was supposed to go to the STANCE annual meeting but I was way too tired and in too much pain to attend. I did at least virtually attend a yoga session to work on my shoulder a bit and it helped somewhat, and the instructor also gave me some good stretches specific to the pain I was feeling, so, that was super helpful.
One of the things that happened at Song Fight! Live this year was the “live fight,” where we all get a title and have a couple of days to write a song to perform live in front of everyone else. This year it was “Valley Highway,” and I’m really happy with the song I wrote, and I’ve expanded on it for the album.
Just as 2021’s “Behind a Mask” inspired me to finally finish my then-long-postponed Songs of Substance, 2024’s “Valley Highway” is inspiring me to finally finish Transitions, the album I’d been thinking about ever since finishing Songs of Substance, and developing ever since 2022’s not-quite-live Song Fight! Live! set.
That’s often how my albums go: I’ll spend a lot of time sitting on them and letting them gestate, until one day some spark causes everything to fall into place and then in a fit of inspiration I record the whole thing over the course of a month. (That’s also what happened with Refactor, when I had a dream and woke up with Deer Drinking from the Catacomb Stream in my head.)
My intention with Transitions is to post early-access/progress updates to my Patreon for $3+ supporters, so if you’re interested in following along and providing feedback as I go, that’s the place to do it.
However, it will be a bit of a slow start, even with this flash of inspiration, as I have a lot going on right now. For example, tomorrow I have a couple of appointments and I might have a private song circle to attend, so I might not be able to start in earnest until Friday (which is wide open aside from yoga at 6 PM).
Also at some point I need to filter through all of the photos I took at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo which I went to on Monday with three online friends. I have a lot of backlogged things to post to my photography section. There’s a bunch of stuff I want to change about how I manage that section though, like I really need to set up an S3/B2-backed LFS archive. I’ve seen a few ways to go about doing that but they’re all so fiddly.
And speaking of websites, I really need to get around to actually building the self-hosted Publ site for Sockpuppet because while Bandcamp doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, I’d really like to have more control over my layout and the kinds of stuff I post there, such as having links to my Mirlo page and make it easier for people buy/stream music on whichever service they want, and also having the Sockpuppet blog be there rather than the Tumblr blog I never post to or having it all intermingled into this blog like it is right now.
But anyway my pain is flaring up really bad now and, oh right, I need to put sheets on my bed. Further rambling will have to wait.