I’m printing up my lyric sheets, practicing my chords, playing to the metronome…and still feeling unprepared. I get in my car tomorrow to drive two and a half hours up to Woodstock, NY, to spend the weekend recording basic tracks for a new CD, with the fabulous recording engineer Mark Dann (Richard Shindell, John Gorka, David Massengill, David Roth, Red Molly, many more…).
The songs are finally written (six originals will accompany two cover tunes), which, of course, seemed like the hard part. But the recording process, while exciting and super-fun, is always tough. Suddenly, you hear your lyrics through the headphones loud and clear — are the songs good enough? Are the decisions you made the right ones? And then there’s the production — will it show off the songs at their best? The truth is, it can be so exhausting and navel-gazing that when I’m done I’m sure I’ll never record again.
My friend Carolann Solebello likes to say recording is just about capturing a moment in time — and I agree that if you take it far more seriously than that you’ll never get it done. It’s so tempting to keep tweaking and worrying and noodling…when really, it’s just your song how your wrote it that year and how you decided to present it in that recording session.
I’ve recorded four albums in 10 years at this point — and each time I thought it was the epitome of what I would ever do. The top of the mountain. The apex of my (however limited) creativity. Good lord! Luckily, it’s not so (I’m so thankful, for instance, that CD #1 was not the top of any mountain). Instead, life keeps on trucking, I keep writing and I keep deciding to drop my hard-earned dollars on putting new songs down for posterity. I keep changing and music keeps changing. That’s the fun of writing and recording songs.
So I’m packing my bags and getting ready to play those new songs into a sensitive microphone that picks up on every single quiver in my voice and highlights every lyric as though it were under a spotlight. But that’s okay. I’m ready to take that journey of recording songs I’ve written once again. I wouldn’t miss it for the world, even if I were the only one on earth to listen. 
Have a great weekend, songwriters!
