Friday, June 27, 2008

get on your knees you freak...

i'm not terribly sure what to write here. back in 1999 i became obsessed with doing some cathy denis song- her one and only hit '(all night long) touch me' sort of straight ahead fuzzy guitars and low vocals. for some reason this morning i awoke with the incredible desire to actually do this. i think after i go home and do the dishes and change the cat litter maybe i actually will do it. or i might give in to ennui and laziness and do nothing when i get home. i also have a strange hankering to take another crack at 'cloudburst' which is a jamc/mbv sounding song i did for the 'down to sleep' cycle- it was a really old song from about 2000/2001. first version had my first ever drunk vocal- i'd been working on the song all week and had tons of trouble recording a decent sounding vocal- went to the velvet dog for the first time and had a giant martini, got nice and drunk and then came home and did the vocal in one take, listened to it, thought i was probably too drunk to judge it properly, went to bed, woke up the next day and listened to it and it was indeed a nice take. i listened to it back when i was reworking the song and it was astonishingly good- totally spot on. there's a drunkennes that you can reach that is almost zen-like with regards to music making.
in other news i overdrew my account. the withdrawal from cdman went down okay, but the 'foreign transaction fee' that my bank tacked on there didn't- it was about $35 and when you add in the $35 overdraft fee i'm behind about $70. it's going to be kind of difficult to get back on my feet after this whole transaction. i guess it's still better to put cds on my credit card. in the future i think i'm just going to save up the money and then pay it to the credit card before i charge it. it's just silliness really. banks are evil. i'd almost say they are giving credit card companies a real run for their money these days. $35 overdraft fees. foreign transaction fees. i've been charged them before with my bank but they've always been very small- it must be like 1% or something. maybe someday they'll be 50% and overdraft charges will be $100. it's not too far off at this rate. and people say that people who say that the system isn't working are too paranoid and alarmist. i'm sure that the day will come when there will indeed be a $100 overdraft fee. god knows what else there will be. i'd like to think i'll be dead by then, but at the current rate of acceleration i'm sure that would be a mathematical impossibility. it's a wonder that costs never go down. one day i guess that it'll be like going to italy where walking around with $50,000 bills in your pockets won't be that strange. maybe the $50,000 bill will have george w. bush's ugly monkey mug on it. you laugh now, but just wait. they're going to run out of good presidents pictures to put on dollar bills and then we'll start seeing things like that. you'd better believe that they'd put ronald reagan on one if they could at the moment.
i've hit a wall with a song i had really high hopes for. just crashed right into it. i thought i had something really amazing and it pooped out on me. i'm also not sure what to do with this new song i've started that's going fairly well. the choices are it can be relegated to being a b-side for a digital single on our website or it can become one of the hidden tracks on the next ep. not a particularly glorious fate on either count, but better than nothing.
who knows... not me.
the next ep is becoming a bit of an afterthought- i don't know why. with those eps i always think they'll be easy and cheap, but they don't seem to be. i wanted to do the mixdown to tape thing for the next one finally, but with the tour looming and the financial pall it is going to cast over everything i do for the rest of the year i'm wondering how this can become a reality.
i'm already in the hole right now quite a bit- i owe stefanie $200 again- a bit of money from some old igo car charges and then i'm going to owe will $45 to fix my bike, my paycheck that i should be getting today isn't going to be big enough to cover my overdraft charges and my rent and health insurance. this is the price that i always pay. i'm trying to get used to it, but it's not really all that possible to get used to. is it time to go to the plasma center? it might be. rush university is doing another sleep study. i'm going to try to get into it because it pays $1500. i probably won't qualify again because i work in a coffeeshop and have such easy access to caffeine, but in the phone interview i will assure the woman that if they need me to quit drinking caffeine that i can in fact do it and be okay- i've done it before. it's not fun for a week or so, but eventually the caffeine headache goes away. if i'm being paid to not be on it then i'm perfectly willing to make such a sacrifice. i think i'm going to have to take this month off of the credit card balances- kind of a shame, but what can you do? it'd be better to pay stefanie off quicker than them. the interest boat has already sailed. i have run up another balance on my paypal card. i'm probably going to buy my pitchfork tickets on them and then that new microphone that i want for my minidisc recorder. o dear... o dear...
will i ever be financially stable? the world may never know...
despite all of this for some reason i still think that we can go on tour and that i will be able to get the ep out by the end of the year. the next record (which we haven't even started recording yet really) isn't coming out until next year. the plan for next year is to concentrate more on the touring aspect. by that i mean we'll probably go on two week-long tours. since the next full-length record isn't going to come out at the end of this year then i think it'll be reasonable to expect for it to come out near the end of next year. it's supposed to be on vinyl. that's what i want for it. it's basically going to cost about the same amount on money it's just going to be an entirely upfront cost all at once. basically this record cost $1600 to master and press. pressing 500 lps will cost exactly that all in one lump sum. i'm toying with the idea of printing the covers myself but it might be cheaper to have the place i want to press them at do the printing as well.
i need to remember to keep my focus on what i'm building here- which is a body of work. no one else wanted to help at the beginning so i took on the load myself figuring it was now or never. i'm glad that i got started when i did- it was actually a bit smart of me. i've done an awful lot and i'm proud of what i've done even if it feels like no one understands it. i can't lose heart now. just need to keep going. we have never been accused of being a second rate derivative version of any one thing which i was kind of always afraid of. maybe we will be with this new record, but even so the next two records are going to be taking things in a different direction again. what's to worry about. a lot i guess...

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