As you know, I spent months finalizing an album of demos (recorded over the course of a dozen years or more) that feature one musician throughout: me. I wrote, sang, played, harmonized, and accompanied every part. I have no plans to release this album commercially as a digital release. That's right -- no apple, no spotify, no amazon, no deezer, no qobuz... my plan is for it to be a physical only product. It's an anti-NFT, I guess, though I didn't consciously set out for it to be that.
This project has been a big labor of love. For the first 250 copies, I designed my own CD sleeve templates, cut hundreds of sheets of chipboard, and I folded and and glued them by hand. I cut TWO linoleum blocks for printing (the first must have been old art store inventory; it disintegrated little by little during the first batch of prints), and I hand-inked and pressed every single cover myself. I recorded these songs over and over, sometimes in other studios and sometimes at my own home, working hard to improve my ability as my own recording engineer and sideman.
And you know what? You have earned the labor of my love. By coming to the small club shows, the streams, the showcases, the house concerts, the CD release parties...you have cheered me on in ways I can never repay.
So from the bottom of my heart, I THANK YOU.
After the BS Song Club members on Patreon claimed first dibs, I took the rest on the road and sold out faster than I could have imagined!
Thanks to Affordable Sound right here in Austin, I have manufactured copies to sell - not handmade, but the music is exactly the same, and the purpose is still to raise money for the next commercial studio release. With some exciting tours on the books for this year, it's a huge relief to have something fresh to offer at the merch table.
My hope is that just as recording demos helps me as an artist to continue to shape and refine a song for later projects, the insomnia waking dream demos CD project will help fund that next studio project so I will (at last!) have the extra cu$hion to release a commercial album with PR, radio, touring, posters, merch, and whatever else funds allow.