Lately I have taken to Substack to fill the scrolling itch and to pump the breaks on my other social media addiction.  It’s like how vaping is marketed as a healthier alternative to smoking.  While it feeds me the quips and diatribes of strangers, it also leads me to contemplate foolish ventures like, “maybe I should start my own Substack.”  But why air my spare thoughts on a popular platform when I can tuck them away in my little corner of the internet? 

An obscure blog seems more fitting for someone that gets around to posting something once every six months or so.  Not that I don’t think of posting something often, much like how one thinks of finishing that letter and putting it in the mailbox.  Many drafts, buried in morning pages and the like. 

With that preamble out of the way, I have a fun announcement:

Childless is recording an album, baBY! 

It took time to go from making noise, to putting a band together, writing enough songs and getting good enough playing them to book shows.  Now it is a whole other animal to record everything we have been doing. 

There has been something freeing about playing music again for the last three years.  Even as we have been playing “pop” songs, there is still so much improvisational energy that goes into the performance.  Playing live music has this immediacy, where I am on the train and it is going and it may be effortless or I am barely hanging on but it is about the motion itself.  I used to lament this quality of music, and took comfort in painting.  As much work as it is to start with a blank canvas, once it’s done, the work is there and remains.  Joni was talking more about the pressure to create another Circle Game here, but there is a pressure when recording to “get it right,” to “capture the sound” of something so energetic and of a moment.  I guess it is the same reason why some canvases sit collecting dust for years or others are destroyed, the tyranny of seeking perfection when it does not exist.

I am blessed to be making this album with very talented people, who all have way more experience than me when it comes to recording music.  Their guidance lights the way in what would otherwise be an intimidating frontier.  For example, Alba can go through take after take of a complicated solo, fluent in DAW programming to work it with ease and precision.  I sit down to record my part and decide after the first take, “that’ll do, I reckon.”  There are countless decisions to be made, like brushstrokes, but you have to keep going. 

I feel this strong urge to produce a physical album at the end of this endeavor.  That used to be more of an obvious goal, but a lot of people do digital only releases.  A few people have called making a record “a vanity project” because you will never recoup on the costs of making it.  But, I mean, is anyone making a profit being an alternative/weird artist these days?  I am just trying to create something before the world ends, and I guess the painter in me wants to hold the music I make in my hands.  All is vanity! Go ahead, make the damn tape/vinyl/cd!