I have this issue with trying to make another album. In fact, it's always been my problem making music. I'll write a song, and it'll be a song that I like, but it will be totally the wrong genre for the album I'm trying to make. It'll sound more like Johnny Cash than Iron and Wine, more like Frank Zappa than The Postal Service and, well, that's just not what I'm going for sometimes. I'm trying to make music that sounds like it was written in this century. Which is hard. So I'm here accumulating a back catalogue of unrecorded songs at record speed, but the album is moving along slowly. And I'm stuck with the quandary: do I try to bend the songs into the right genre? Do I try to make them something they're not, with some trick of production, some doubled voice or synthesizer noise, some change of tempo or instrumentation? Or do I try to make several albums simultaneously, each of which having its own theme and feel? Or do I forget about it all and pursue a career fixing people's computers and making lots of money and buying lots of shit?
Part of the problem is that I've only got one path for recording. My voice, my acoustic guitar, this one microphone, this laptop. That's it. The question is how much can I do with this setup? Sometimes I feel like everything sounds the same, and other times I'm boggled by the vast array of sounds I can make even given this limited equipment. But it's another question: I could wait until I get back to the States and I've got an amplifier and more microphones and more money and start recording then, but I'd lose some temporal freshness, and my willingness and time available to do the project might be diminished. And do I really need more sounds than I've currently got? I promised myself this album would be better than the last, but does that mean I need to have fancier equipment? Or just spend more time? Or what? Not sure...
And will anybody even listen to it?
By the way, if you want to hear how it's all coming, you can go to seasac.gotdns.com and navigate over to Latif Learned. The current work is all under the section called Demos, but that's for lack of a better title, and also because I've not decided if these recordings are final or works in progress. More are being put up soon.