dreaming is free

today is loafing day. i plan on doing absolutely nothing today. nothing. at. all.
maybe watch a few movies, maybe not. it's possible that i might make another guide track, but as it happens i might have to wait to arrange the song before i do so. i resurrected a song i wrote back in 1999 that i'm fairly happy with- reworked it for strings and i went through the lyrics and wrote them all down. they were surprisingly good, i have to admit- a lot better than i was expecting. that's often the case when i go back and read my old lyrics. sometimes they're better than lyrics that i write these days- at least less stuck in a rut. i will have to fix them somehow- not sure how that will be- they are probably a bit of a cure rip off. i will probably just shorten the song as i've been enjoying cutting my songs to bits for this particularly cycle. this song also has three verses- which i never do anymore because it takes too long for me to do two verses as it is.
i have caught some kind of weird cough. it's just a bit disconcerting in some ways because now whenever i catch a cough i worry that it's going to turn back into that cough that i couldn't get rid of for almost a year. when i think about it though that one is always the scariest. why i didn't immediately go to a doctor is beyond me at this point. this new cough has gone straight to my chest. delightful! i don't even think it was in my throat for an hour- all of a sudden i had this really bad chest cough. we have a bunch of cough syrup left over that seems to be helping. i was in a bit of pain by the time i went to bed, but today it seems to be less painful. i also took some emergen-c. i wish we had some colloidal silver because that shit would knock it right out of the water. i won't start worrying until it gets closer to the date of the show and it still hasn't cleared up. i think it should be alright, though.
bootlegs, bootlegs, bootlegs. i have three or so new ones to listen to. there's been a long dry spell, but man is it over.
fyi the students are definitely back. it's a good thing we won't be around much this weekend for the unpleasant surge in drop offs. we do have to practise on sunday. i pondered just moving all of our equipment up to evanston to practise at their house, but that seems a bit ridiculous to me. i suppose it would be more considerate to our neighbors, but then again...
we were interviewed for that 'what to wear during an orange alert' blog. that'll be up a few days after the empty bottle show. the guy asked me good questions- one was mainly a recording question. those seem to be the only kinds of questions that get me to talk. it was also done through email which worked out much much better. i am about a million times more articulate through the written word. whenever i try to think of the word 'articulate' in that context the word always eludes me- i find that incredibly funny.
recorded a nice guide track yesterday. best idea i've had in a while- it was for this keyboard sample thing that fades in and out and is completely arhythmic. i did the part (which will probably be used in the final mix) on the sampler and had a microphone plugged in that i counted through very steadily. i then sang a scratch vocal just to see how it worked. when you take the counting out it's just perfect and even better you can't hear the counting when it's turned down. the problem with doing such stark songs is that oftentimes if i use a rhythm guide like the keyboard drum machine thing, even when you have it turned down all the way or even if you record over it you can still hear it very faintly if you're listening on headphones. i remember listening to 'sloba' and still hearing the drum machine track just at the beginning before the real drums kick in. with the stark quietness of these tracks it's becoming important not to have to worry about that, and my idea seemed to work very well. yay. i'm always happy when something i try works out like that- a problem solving kind of thing. it makes me think that i actually might be good at what i do.