Push. Pull.

I've been geeking on a singer-songwriter who's been around for a while, in a band, and now she's out on her own. I bought the songbooks for her band's first two releases, and was flipping through them and suddenly saw a picture of the band performing in a familiar setting. I read a bit of the text around the photo, and realized that the engineer that helped the band with their first album was actually one of the engineers I used on my second album.

We only did two sessions at this engineer's studio, and weren't able to do more for reasons that I don't fully understand. We did those two sessions, and then the engineer suddenly "didn't have any time available" for the rest of the summer. It was sudden and unpleasant, we had planned to finish the recording there, and the engineer telling us we couldn't come back was him pulling the rug out from under my producer and me. It was stunning, and hurtful.

I even forgot to credit the guy in my liner notes, I had put the incident so much out of my mind. It was just startling to know that he had done so many benevolent things for an artist I admire. She even called him a saint.

Things just seem determined to sting these days. Especially when I'm hoping to feel happy, or at least, stable, about things.

There's another little project, a non-musical one, that has been peeking in at the edges of my consciousness. Against my will. Let's just say, there's another person involved. Who doesn't seem to want to play the way I want, let's just say. This project was not even an idea that occurred to me, until it hit me that it might be a good one. But after hours of trying to interface today, I'm starting to realize "no dice".

I've been reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. In the book he asserts that all the smarts in the world don't mean anything without a measure of practical intelligence, the ability to talk your way into things, convince people to help, or at least feel sympathetic to your cause. I am one of those people who never learned much practical intelligence. Not that I have a a lot of smarts either...

Things just feel a bit grim today. Maybe nothing specific is wrong.

Right now I am recording Spats from the BBC. I am going to do that, and then I'm going to shut my computer down, read for half an hour, and then go to bed.

j.