New Solo Tracks

First of all, a shout out to the healthy music scene in Dubuque, IA. We've had a blast here over the last three days, picked up an unscheduled gig last night, and made some friends who are going to follow us up to Minneapolis to party and see the next couple shows.

I've posted some new solo tracks on Myspace for the public ear-hole, so click on the title of the blog post, it has a link to something related to the blog every time I write. In case you can't locate those huge letters at the top of the screen, it's http://www.myspace.com/trevorjonesmusic.

99% of my creative mojo juice goes toward Frogs Gone Fishin' these days and as such, I have little time for any solo musical activities. Before we went on tour however, I recorded around 12 tracks by myself in my apartment in New Orleans. I used a simple program called GarageBand to produce the tunes, which essentially lets me sit in my bedroom and record with little else but my instruments and computer, a very low pressure creative environment where I am my own engineer, songwriter, producer, performer and critic.

As a result, the songs turn out much more conceptual than structural, and I have the opportunity to play passages how I mentally conceive them to sound. I also get to play every instrument on the tracks. Though my drumming skills admittedly need some polish, "The Zoo" features a funky drum loop I created by simply resting the computer on the floor tom, pressing record, and going nuts (later pruning the track for a tasty loop, which I played bass and sang over).

This is quite a different process from writing/recording songs as a band. I greatly enjoy bringing the meat of an idea to a band, only to watch them apply their creative alterations, how they hear the song in their respecetive mind's ear in order to create a piece which we can all feel apart of.

Both methods of recording are fun and both necessary for artistic development. The truly amazing part of the process is the technology which musicians, amateur or advanced, have access to. This is a double-edged sword, as GarageBand has probably produced far more naseating noise than collosal compositions to contribute to the world's collective catalogue.

But hey, it's all music right? We'll leave that discussion for the next post...