Self Produced Albums

On Friday I'm seeing the band Tune-Yards. How wonderful is it that after working on recording my own album, I'm going to see a musician who recorded her first album with a hand recorder and Audacity?

One thing I've discovered in life is that when your interest grows in a subject, the world curves to your interest. The other day, Luke told me I should release my album onto Bandcamp.com and attempt to sell it. I was unsure, because I didn't think it was quite good enough and I'm still quite insecure about my music (strangely enough, because of the singing aspect). Also, I feel that as a musician I'M not good enough. I mean, I've never listened to a Bob Dylan song before in my life. I know nothing.

Putting my music on a website doesn't mean people will buy it. But it does mean that it's there, it's official, I did something, and maybe some people will like it.

Merrill Garbus (the lead singer of Tune-Yards) is one of my idols. Why? There's a bunch of reasons. What caught my attention about her at first is the fact that in her music, she sounds like a guy. In fact, I thought she was a guy at first. When I saw the name "Merrill", I thought maybe it could be one of those unisex names. Even when the info I read about her clearly said she was a girl, I still didn't believe it. So I looked up a video of her live. When I saw a girl singing like that I just thought "Oh my god, she is so cool."

And the more I found out, the more I liked. Previously she was a vocal teacher in Kenya, she wrote a musical, and she works with children in a non-profit organization for music education. She's not super skinny and idealistic like most female musicians. She doesn't give a shit. She's Merrill Garbus.

Probably my favorite song from her self recorded album is "Sunlight". The drum beat is great, and her voice, oh man.

I guess it means I ought to work on my own self-produced album. Before I put anything up on the web, I want to fix rhythm issues, see if the levels are ok, and change the songs I don't really like. I don't know if I'll do that before summer starts, because I want to put quality into it. I've done the first step of working on writing many songs in a short period of time. Now it's time to settle down and focus.