Creativity

With so much going on, both personally and musically on side projects, the Cats have been sadly neglected…

But no longer! We are back in the studio, aka the ManCave, aka my place, to revisit a number of songs. They are being re-tracked as they were never had more than a homespun demos, with programmed drums and bad bass by me.

Having learned a lot more about mixing also pushed towards that outcome.

The opportunity to review, and in some cases, rearrange the songs is very exciting. New ideas and approaches, key changes, and a desire to capture better performances rather than just get the thing down should make these new recordings much better than the old demos. That’s the hope anyway.

So below is a brief video of one of our sessions. Thanks to Chris and NeMo for their talent, energy and Sunday afternoon.

More to come and hopefully a release soon.

This is a teaser, which I hope will end up meeting expectations.

When I was teaching, I noticed that often the most creative ideas occurred when there were limits imposed. This is not anything innovative on my part; perhaps I should have read more professional literature. This article from Fast Company goes into the subject in greater detail.

Still, that experience stuck with me, so I recently decided to test myself by imposing clear parameters to the writing of the next song: a common root note for all the chords and constrained writing for the lyrics (inspired by It’s still in development so no previews yet, but so far, it’s producing interesting results.

Live music is making a comeback, and I’m very glad that is happening for a lot of reasons. I hope musicians and audiences alike will continue to be safe. It’s tempting after months of being cooped up to want to celebrate, and adding alcohol into the mix could make some people forget themselves and the sanitary habits that have kept the pandemic relatively contained. Perhaps more than ever, it’s important to be cautious.

Until next time, be well!