Twenty-thirteen.

Another year to review, for no one’s benefit except my own really.  I’ll try to keep this brief.

This has been the year of Making A Record The Serious Way.  At the end of last year, I knew I had an album’s worth of material, my strongest yet, and I wanted to take a stab at Doing It Right.  Well, you know.   It’s all I’ve been talking about all year: mastering, crowdfunding, vinyl, videos, promotion, the whole nein.  There’s still a couple months left of all this business leading up to the RECORD RELEASE SHOW ON FEBRUARY 19!!!!!!  …But since we’re reflecting now, I’m gonna just go ahead and say, I don’t know if it’s worth it.

What I mean by ‘it’ is going super hard on the ‘business’ end of music and not hard enough on the music end.  Folks, I have been mostly unemployed for most of the past year, and let me tell you, it is trivially easy to make music your full-time job and forget to make music.  Of course there’s always more you can do on either end, but what I missed the most over this past year was touring–lord but I love traveling and seeing friends and playing music every goddamn night, what could be better really–and writing songs.

I will say that I was pleased and gratified that I was able to perform pretty regularly throughout the year as a result of being asked to join many bills.  It’s easy to lose sight of what I’ve ‘built’ over the past five years in this local scene, because it’s not something I can point to or touch, but I guess it really is the relationships, huh?  Aw, come here, alla youse, group hug group hug.

But I did write half a dozen songs, which I guess after the past five years or so of keeping track appears to be my low-water mark.  I can live with that.  Here they are, in order of appearance:

1. Fledgling Feeling (A Lone Damn Tin Piranha)
2. Lullaby (for Fynn) – I wrote this for my dear old friend Robyn on the occasion of her son’s birth.  Hadn’t really thought of it as a public offering, but I performed it at my last show to fairly good response, so maybe that’ll be a thing..?
3. Servant Wedding – In which I paraphrase (plagiarize) a lovely speech my friend gave at his wedding about spoon rings and love as resistance.  Haven’t gone public with this one yet, but sometime soon perhaps.
4. Tinder
5. The Anti-Capitalist’s Guide To Getting It On
6. David

I got a couple irons in the fire, also, but maybe those’ll make a nice head start in the new year.

Anyway, when I say “I don’t know if it’s worth it”, don’t think I mean I regret it or anything.  Just figuring it all out, y’know?  And *certainly* don’t think I’m not totally stoked for my ALBUM RELEASE FEBRUARY 19!!!!!!!111!!!  Because I am.

So yeah, goals for 2014, pretty simple really:

1. Put out this goddamn album.
2. Go on a gaddamn tour.
3. Write at least six (maybe twelve?) gaddumn songs.
4. Fucking A, put out another thing, why not?  There has, in fact, been talk of a split cassette with some of my fav indie artists.

Cheers, folks.