Hey everybody! Just to recap, this year I’m doing the RPM Challenge which requires me to write and record ten songs within the month of February. As I mentioned before, most of the time I’ll take three to four months to write, revise, record, edit, and mix a song. To successfully meet the RPM deadline, I have to condense the whole production process to two or three days per song. To my amazement, I’ve been able to do this and as far as I can tell, the material isn’t suffering. So far, I have completed three songs:
1. Only God Can Hear You Sing
2. Teeth But Didn’t Bite
3. Ampersands
I took a break yesterday, and will continue working on song number four today, which is called “Dark Kind of Guy”. It’s another fun one with bass, upright piano, and a dirty drum kit. I have words for the verses but have to come up with choruses. The music reminds me of the band Chicago a little bit. I’m in the process of scheduling the great TK to come and record saxophone on it, but he’s in Asia for another few weeks.
So anyhow, I’ve been so busy working on the tracks that I’ve had very little time to blog about any of them. Another interesting thing is that in order to keep moving forward, I am forbidding myself to go back and listen to any previous songs. As soon as they’re done and posted, that’s it. No time to screw around.
I am hoping to finish all ten songs and still have time to go back and fix a few things. I already know I need to beef up the end chorus of Only God Can Hear You Sing, and boost the vocals in the bridge section of Teeth But Didn’t Bite. Ideally, I can do this all before I submit my cd to RPM. If I do run out of time, I can send RPM the versions I already have, and then tweak all the songs prior to releasing them as a full length William Steffey album later in March. As it stands, I have no idea for an album name or artwork.
Well, I gotta go back into Evernote and work on words for Dark Kind of Guy. Hopefully I’ll make a run of it and finish the entire song today. You’ll be the first to know!
-WS
