lifted sugar eyes

listening to mbv at the moment- big surprise.
got some more work done yesterday- a lot of it might fall under the category of 'scratch tracks.' when we have a song that's considered 'dead' and i continue to work on it i usually tend to record a drum part myself because most of the time i feel like i'm wasting stefanie's valuable time working on it when i've pretty much already given up on it. i did drum parts to two 'dead' songs yesterday- both of them ridiculously old. i have had a desire for a while now to finish the unfinished tracks from the 'down to sleep' sessions. the true test i guess would be whether or not i will bother to add strings to them. i guess i wanted to have them finished because a few opportunities have come and gone for compilations- i like to give out extraneous tracks for those just in case anyone's paying any attention and because i often have songs that i'm thrilled with that just don't fit in anywhere.
the two tracks- one is called 'all i have' and the other is called 'swirl around you.' 'all i have' i think was started when i was 18- i rewrote the lyrics twice while we were working on 'down to sleep.' i filmed myself putting it together for the whole 'down to sleep' diary thing that i never bothered to post on youtube and then ended up abandoning it because i had a fantastic scratch track and a great vocal recorded but could never get a decent sounding guitar or drum track. i did both of those yesterday. it's possible that i didn't get those yesterday- although the drum track sounds pretty nice. the guitar still doesn't sound quite right. not sure why...
i guess that since i can't really work on anything at the moment finishing these tracks will somehow keep me occupied and i'll have a well of extra tracks to draw from should anymore of these opportunities for compilations or anything like that spring up. that way if one does i can hopefully get string parts recorded for them very quickly and that way i'm not wasting time recording strings i'm not going to use. 'swirl around you' was written when i was living on the plaza with tom. it was actually written about someone from the past- i wrote a few songs about girls from that period and this is one of them. i toyed with putting it on 'down to sleep' or at least giving it a shot and recorded a really nice sounding acoustic guitar and this awesome weird tremolo electric guitar. i even wrote a really ornate string arrangement for it- it was going to be very ambitious, but naturally it never came to pass.
i emailed some people who do diy booking in europe and the uk to see if they'd be interested in helping us out and they emailed me back saying that we're not really their cup of tea, but that should we ever cook up some solid plans to tour in europe we should get in touch with them and they'd be happy to get us in touch with people who they thought could help us out. nice. i actually appreciate this kind of response- it's quick and doesn't cause you to pull your hair out wondering and getting upset. i much prefer being told the truth in lieu of waiting, wondering, waiting, waiting and hearing absolutely nothing.
maybe the europe thing will have to wait. i think maybe it would be best to just stick with our current plan- touring the east coast in september next year. we are planning on taking a trip for stefanie's birthday next year. i'd like to finally get us to europe. i am trying to get this current ep released and saving the money for that should be somewhat manageable as it's in different parts, as opposed to how it normally is where i have to scrounge all of the money together at once and meet tons of unexpected costs along the way, this is kind of bit by bit since i'm going to do the packaging myself. once that's released we're going to try and get 'all hope is blind' released with an arts grant since it's going to be so expensive for us and we are going to have to buy some equipment to get it the way we want it to be. that way hopefully we can get it released before the next tour and then take 2010 off to figure out what we're going to do next and pay back some incurred debt and whatnot. keeping this going for so long has been quite emotionally taxing as well. it's kind of taken over my life. anyone who wants evidence should take one of these rambling blog entries at random to read through. i don't talk about much else. i wanted to watch that cure 'trilogy' dvd yesterday but in my brain i actually heard the words 'you don't have time to do that- that would take three whole hours!' it would be nice to get a slower pace going. i'm finding that the nagging urgency has sort of lead up to the 'all hope is blind' album because there isn't really anything real planned beyond then (except maybe 'chinese blue' which is only about halfway through the massive writing process). there are a lot of good ideas related to what to do next, but it would probably be well advised to go at a slower pace. that will allow us to save more money towards touring and getting a functional 16-track analog studio going, as that is the eventual goal.