It's quite a thing to ponder, isn't it?
For a start, when I was in Socratean schooling, never in a month of Sundays would I have thought that I would be so very much into music that I would have enough to fill a CD! I was always sketching something or other, building stuff with LEGOs, and other things -- that led me to think that I would become an animator or 3D modeller. And, I mean, nowadays, I do that stuff... I model with Google SketchUp and I sometimes do the odd bit of stop-motion animation. But, primarily, I'm a composer. I spend more time at ZOROASTER-2 than anything else -- I hear songs in the television adverts and I think of whose style it most resembles: Mark Mothersbaugh or Steve Jablonsky?
Talking of which, whenever someone talks to me about the cinema, my first thought is not the subject of the film or the actors in it, but rather who composed the music. "I saw Mousehunt yesterday!" "Oh, Alan Silvestri wrote that score."
So. The next album. Needless to say, Utopia has not been a huge success. I've only made three copies -- one is mine, the other two I gave away gratis. But, it does serve as a jolly nice résumé for a potential composing job.
Anyway, I'm just starting to write new songs for the next album. Hopefully, they'll turn out better than many of the tracks on Utopia. I don't know how I managed it, but most of Utopia's tracks ended up being in the minor key.
Then, there are a few that just should never have been recorded. Like Lancashire Scherzo. I listened to it just now. Every composer has a piece that he wishes he'd never written... Lancashire Scherzo is not that song, exactly. It'd be my second choice. My least-favourite song would be one that I knocked together at the last second for a project in radio broadcasting class at university -- it's called Spam and Beans for President, Please (or SBaPP for short). The purpose of that piece was to be the background music for my rendition of an Ad Council PSA about uninformed voters. Naturally, you will never be hearing SBaPP on any album.
For this next project, I'm going to score out all of the music in NoteWorthy Composer so I can make adjustments where necessary. Whereas, with a recorded improvisation, you've only one shot to do it right. If you don't like something, you only have three options: record something else and hope you like it better, leave it as it is and be forever dissatisfied, or just leave it out entirely.
The all-score method will, naturally, take longer than just improv, but it'll be more worth my time. I may do a few improvisations, but it'll be mainly scores. I mean, I'll have to record during my most inspired hours (usually early morning or late night).
Well, I've gone on long enough.
