more album thoughts

Well, things have mercifully slowed down a bit.

I've been getting some really nice feedback on A PIANO SAGA. Wanna read something insane? Someone told me yesterday that it's the greatest CD they've ever heard. I feel like I won an award. Thank you for that.

It's a funny thing, though, because the CD wasn't even made with any intention on my part. It was just very, very fortuitous to have a great night, in a great venue, with a great audio engineer. But I didn't even know how good she was until I'd listened to the recording several times.

I can't really describe how strange it is to have made an album this way. Yet I wouldn't have had it any other way. The honesty and intensity of it would not have been the same had we planned to record it in a studio, or at least at Xavier in more of a studio fashion, i.e., with more than one chance at everything.

First of all, we wouldn't have found a studio with a piano that matches the Xavier piano. Again, many have called Xavier's Steinway 'the best piano in St. Louis'. The only viable studio option I know of is Webster's studio, which is a very good one, and they have a very good piano, actually. But nowhere near the quality of the Xavier piano, and the room sound doesn't even begin to stack up to Xavier AT ALL.

The album has such an epic sound and feeling to me, exactly the kind of sound I wanted to have on an album, i.e., something that sounds like a movie company spent $35 million on it. There is absolutely nowhere else in St. Louis where we would've achieved similar results.

Second of all, even if we had found a studio and a piano we were happy with, it would've cost a lot more money and we would probably still be working on it. Money-wise, the actual amount spent on the use of the venue, the recording, mixing, and mastering, is utterly laughable. In a good way. Very very inexpensive. You wouldn't believe it if I told you. The DVD was even MORE ridiculously inexpensive to make. The artwork, too, was pretty inexpensive. All of the money went into the manufacturing of the final product. That was some fairly serious money. Much more than the most important element, which is the recording itself.

Speaking of which, I'm happy with all of the artwork in every possible sense of the word. I don't quite know how, but it's absolutely perfect for the recording.

And, back to the recording thing, don't forget: the sound and feeling would be impossible to equal, let alone the actual content! I say that because my thinking before A PIANO SAGA revealed itself was to make two albums with about ten pieces on each, so that I didn't use so much good material on one album. Well, using so much good material on one album is the smartest thing to do, regardless of how creatively expensive it is.

None of this takes into account how much time Chelsea VandeDrink would've had to make the album with me in a conventional way. Or, more like, would NOT have had.

Anyway, I'm beginning to ramble. The point is that my debut album came together in a way that still makes me shake my head. My good friend, Todd [who made the photo graphic on the back that still gets a lot of praise] would say that it happened perfectly due to the intentions that were set into motion a long time ago, and that it just materialized because it was time for it to happen. I guess he's right.

Now what? Well, I've still got to figure out this whole website CD sales thing. A nagging, silly issue just needs to get resolved. I also need to gameplan a bit more.