RPM Challenge – Record an Album in 28 Days

There’s no way in hell I could pull this off in February.  There are three reasons:

I am so far out of practice it’s scary.  I have probably put in less than six hours of practice with my guitar over the last two years.  Even worse, I’ve probably put in less than 30 minutes of practice on my saxophone over the last 10 years.  That is not very conducive to creativity.

I don’t have the time to spare to get myself into playing shape again and write and record 10 songs.  Even if I use some old songs (which I definately would) I still just don’t have the time to spare.  I spend too much of my free time just commuting to work to pull off this challenge now.

I haven’t been able to write a decent song in years.  From July 1997 to May 2000 I played in a band that called itself Prime Meridian.  During that stretch of time I wrote tons of material.  I would not allow the band to do any cover songs, so every note we played was written by the band.  We rehearsed two or three times a week and could more or less write songs on demand.  We’d show up to practice, decide to spend some time writing, and by the time we finished for the night there would be at least one completed new song.  Granted, 99.999% of what we wrote was garbage, but that’s not the point.  It was ours and it was Fun.  From May 2000 through December 2002 I lost it.  I barely played at all (kinda like right now) and just lost the knack, or whatever it is.  I joined Break Even in December ’02 and played with that band until February 2005.  We were predominately a cover band, but we did some original material.  I contributed three songs.  One was written in 1992, another in 1996, and the third was written in ’92 and then gutted and rewritten in 1998 for Prime Meridian.  I did write a couple of songs with the idea of given them to Break Even, but they were so bad that I didn’t bother.  I just lost the spark I guess.

So that’s why I won’t be signing up for the RPM challenge to write and record an album during the 28 days of February.  Sorry.

But…….

That doesn’t mean I can’t do it on my own during the 31 days of March does it?

If nothing else it’s an excuse to get my dumb ass playing the guitar again.  I figure I can spend the rest of February practicing the guitar for a little while every night.  I could go through old tapes and pull out some old forgotten songs.  I would also definately use the three songs I gave to Break Even (because, unlike 99.999% of the songs I’ve written in my life I actually like them) and maybe some songs I wrote while I was working at Northeast Broadcasting school… there are a lot of those.  I can use that sort of stuff as a starting point, and then try and force out a few new songs.  Maybe even 35 minutes of new songs.

At this moment in time I am very much into the idea of doing this.  However tomorrow I could be 100% against it.  If I do go through with it and manage to pull it off I’ll let you know.