Done. Finished. Complete. Success. 15 years in a row, babie. Every year since 2012 has seen me successfully complete the RPM Challenge (and the FAWM too).

The album is called The Great American Road trip because it was mixed during the great american road trip. Duh. The official home is my alonetone page, right here. The unofficial home is on my hearthis.at page which only exists because it plays nicely with wordpress.com.

I ended up with 16 songs and dropped six of them from the final project. My overall reaction to this year’s batch of new songs is… meh. I don’t care. That’s not the point of this thing. They didn’t exist and now they do and that is a good thing, even if the songs themselves are not good things. Dig it?

We are home from our week long epic road trip. I was expecting to get home tomorrow but we made it back a little early.

I mixed one song today. I’m not sharing it because it is terrible and I should have left it unfinished. That leaves me with one song left to mix, then I have to pick the running order and make some cover art and then I’m done.

I would do more tonight but I am utterly exhausted and I want to flake a little before I fall asleep.

I’ll wrap all of this stuff up tomorrow.

The RPM Challenge asks for 10 songs or 35 minutes of music. FAWM asks for 14 songs.

With two songs mixed tonight while sitting in a hotel room near Knoxville, Tennessee I am up to 13 songs finished with three more still left to mix and three days left to finish. I think we’re going to have another success this year, don’t you?

The epic road trip took us from Louisville, KY to Nashville, TN and back. My gastric bypass disagreed with lunch and I puked on the side of the highway, route 65 North, somewhere in Kentucky.

I had also hoped to mix three songs but I am exhausted and only managed two. I’m going to bed now even though it’s still laughably early. I’m so old it’s like a joke, man.

I woke up this morning in Syracuse, NY and now I am about to go to sleep in Louisville, KY. After about 11 hours driving I have reduced myself to mush, mentally speaking.

I managed to mix a couple of songs though. Three down, 13 to go.

Today is the 21st. I didn’t get a chance to give a summary of yesterday’s progress and now it’s bed time and I guess I’ll just summarize yesterday and today at the same time.

I finished all of the lyrics, all of the vocal tracking, and all of the lead guitars. My wife and I left on our week long road trip a day early but I managed to get everything recorded. Most of my guitar playing sucks, all of my singing sucks, and the songwriting in general sucks, but all of the tracking is done and now I can get down to mixing all 16 songs.

One down, 15 to go….

The original RPM Challenge website had a blog section. That was where I started these goofy daily update posts. When it went away I moved those posts to a tumblr account and then after a while to this page. It’s silly. I don’t get anything out of this and it makes zero sense to anyone else on the planet Earth..

But here I am posting them. Sorry, Earth.

The difficulty with these stupid posts is that when I have a couple of productive days in a row I lose track of what I did on each day. I’m in that boat right now. Day 19 was yesterday. What did I do yesterday?

I started the day by blowing off my daily exercise routine and playing guitar. I put leads on four songs. When I was done, my un-callused fingertips and I were in huge pain but we managed to drive in to work for the day. After work the only project work I had queued up was writing lyrics and melodies. I made it through three songs before I ran out of mental gas. Those three songs plus two that I had written out the day before set me up for some car music on day 20. You’ll get that write up tomorrow. Be patient.

At the end of day 19 I had 16 songs in progress. Eight were ready to mix, five were ready for vocals, and three were still waiting on lyrics. We are traveling from the 22nd to the 28th so I am quickly running out of time to finish tracking everything. I will mix the recordings while traveling (I hope). Reminder, the RPM Challenge requires either 10 songs or 35 minutes of music for success. The other February songwriting challenge, FAWM, requires 14 songs. RPM is looking good. FAWM is looking good too but maybe not quite as good. I’m dedicated to success though so we’ll see how it goes.

Over the last 3-4 years I have become a weird sort of creature of routine. I have an agenda set for early each morning and any time I stray from or vary that agenda it makes my teeth ache and it sets me on edge for the whole day.

Yesterday (day 18) I nuked the whole damn thing in the name of the RPM Challenge (and I did the same thing today, day 19). Instead of drinking a water bottle->taking my morning vitamins->doing my daily exercise->eating breakfast I drank a water bottle->took my morning vitamins->recorded rhythm guitars until my fingers hurt too much to play anymore.

I had five songs ready for rhythm guitars… the last five songs for the month… unless I do something stupid like add more, which if I do I will punch myself square in the nose for being such an idiot… and I tracked ’em. As of about 8:00am yesterday, all of the rhythm guitar parts for this year’s album were complete. The ready-for-rhythm-guitars bucket on my trello board is empty.

Of course that doesn’t help me at all if I can’t get lyrics and melodies written and vocals recorded and lead guitars recorded before we leave for our epic road trip on Sunday. There were eight songs in the ready-for-lyrics bucket on said trello board at that time. After work I managed to get through two of those eight songs. They are now in the ready-for-vocals bucket. Hopefully they will be joined by a few more songs tonight and then I will do a car music tomorrow to track some vocals. Then, hopefully, I will write lyrics for the remaining songs after that and then do another, final, car music vocal tracking session on Saturday morning. Then I will hopefully crank out lead guitars for all of them before going to bed on Saturday and oh my shit have I dug a deep hole for myself this year.