I Have "Totally Been Slacking"

So this marks the first official "not for class" post on my blog. I actually had the intention of continuing posting even after my assigned quoted of posts desisted, but the Brokes and I have been revising and reworking the album so much, I have been hesistating from revealing anything before I can make some authoritative statements.

I decided to abandon that approach. The album is obviously still in the works, but from what I have observed, Mike is really making an effort to get as much recording done as often as possible. Everyone else seems to be motivated in a similar matter (minus the band's blogger of course).

These are all good things of course, but there are reasons why bands wear the merit badge of "self-produced" with honor. When you listen to a drum track for the first time, it might sound great...even better than you may have expected. However, after the 100 time that late crash in the 2nd pre-chorus sounds like a 'slap in the face everytime' (to quote Mike).

Then there are the what if questions. What if we added piano to that track? or violin? What if we supplemented that chorus with a choir, rather than just one or two vocal tracks? As someone who has written one or two things before, I can sympathize with the reality that you will never entirely be happy with a project to the point where you would call it finished (except in those rare case where you can even believe you wrote/recorded/whatever-ed something). I think this is because what drives an artist--a good artist at least--is not always selfish. there genuinely is a desire to please the audience, and this drives artists to always be better.

So...the album will get done. It won't get done because we'll all join in a sigh of relief and agree it can't be any better than where it's at. It will get done because there's someone out there--someone I don't even know--that is going to think the Unsmokable Brokes is an amazing band. Because of that, the album has to get done.