Author: robertjames1971

I'm wicked tall.

2026 50/90 Challenge Day 53/90

I was expecting that day 53 would be another day with no musical progress made at all. I ended up being wrong, but only just barely. Last night at about 10:00pm I was sitting up in bed with my iPad and I had an idea for a sort of drone-esque bass riff. I brought up GarageBand and failed miserably in my attempt to translate the idea into reality, but I did end up with a new song for the 50 songs in 90 days project. It’s just fake MIDI bass and fake MIDI drums with a fake MIDI guitar to act as a guide for when I record the real thing, but the full song structure was worked out. It exists even if it doesn’t really sound like what I was shooting for. That’s fine.

That’s it for day number 53. I filed the song idea as number 48… and there are still 37 days to go. I can’t believe how far along I am at this point. I won’t say I’m almost done (I have finished 37 songs and there is still a long way to go before I finish 50) but I’ve done a ton more than I usually do by day 53. I’m feeling pretty good about the state of things.

Betcha a dollar I just jinxed the whole project.

Dolly

I have never been a Dolly Parton fan. Musically, particularly. 9-to-5 was a good enough movie (back in the early days of cable TV it was on at least one of the movie channels at least 10 times a day every day for decades) so I guess I was okay with her as an actress. Country music makes my brain hurt though… a lot. I mean… a lot. I just hate it. It makes my skin crawl. It’s physically painful for me. So no, I was not a fan of her from a music perspective. Sorry.

I do recognize a total bad ass force of nature when I see one though and she was one. Not just a force but a positive force. Super heroes aren’t real, but she was and that was close enough.

Rest in peace, Dolly Parton. The grim reaper totally took the wrong 80 year old. 

In an attempt to make this even more about me, I never went to her theme park, Dollywood (which I believe is the number two theme park in the US behind Disney World? Is that right? I think it is), but I almost went once and I was really close to it another time. 

In my senior year of high school the music department was trying to plan a trip and the music director wanted to take us to Dollywood. He gave two reasons. First, while no one in Massachusetts in the late 80’s gave two shits about country music (we were the last market in the country without a country themed radio station and I was epically proud of that), it was one of only two really truly American forms of music. Our music director said the other was jazz, which is true to a point but I believe the correct answer is blues given that jazz and rock and roll and all of its derivatives evolved from blues. Whatever. The second reason was, obviously, that whole awesome-amuesment-park thing. We didn’t end up going. We went to Richmond, VA instead. There was a high school music competition/festival/thing there at the time and our concert and jazz bands played as well as all of our chorus groups. If I remember correctly, the jazz band (with a certain red head soloing on tenor saxophone) kicked some serious ass that week. Also, there was the Kings Dominon amusement park near Richmond and they had like three water flume rides and a stand up roller coaster with a full loop that kicked 30000 flavors of ass.

The time I was really close was earlier this year on The Great American Road Trip I took with my beloved wife. We were in the same town as Dollywood. I don’t think we ever got close enough to see any of it, but we were close enough to see a bunch of road signs telling us we were almost there.

2026 50/90 Challenge Day 52/90

Yesterday was a light day progress wise. I put rhythm guitars onto two songs. Songs number 46 and 47 to be exact. They both already had lyrics so they are now in the ready for vocals bucket.

37 songs complete, one ready to mix, six ready for vocals, and three ready for lyrics and melodies. That’s 47 songs in total… and still over a month to go. It is lucky that I am so far ahead of things right now because I am probably going to get shut out today (day 53). Its looking likely at least.

That Time of Year Again

It is a little on the early side for this, but tonight the annual binging of 9/11 documentaries has begun. Jen found a new one on Hulu and we’re watching it as I type this. It focuses on small groups of people who survived together being reunited 25 years later. It’s brutal but it is also heartwarming. That’s hard to wrap my head around, but it works so far.

Why do we do it every year? Honoring the memories of those who didn’t make it out? Honoring the trauma of those who did? We were 100s of miles away from all of the events that day so maybe we’re just thumbing our noses at the memories of how scared and helpless we felt. I don’t know. I don’t think I want to know, really. We do it every year and we’re not going to stop any time soon.

In other, unrelated, and much happier news, the U-Haul trailer that Bellana rented to move most of her stuff to California is packed and ready to be picked up to start its journey West. Bellana worked her ass off over the last few days go get everything ready. They are coming to get the thing tomorrow. She is at her dad’s tonight (it is his birthday) but she sent my wife a text asking if we could run to the store and pick up an Apple AirTag and put it into one of the boxes so that we can watch the trailer as it travels across the country. Ain’t living in the future fun?

Okay. I have a super long day in store for tomorrow and it is getting late so I am going to go to bed. Good night, everyone.

2026 50/90 Challenge Day 51/90

I was hoping to have a lot of time to work on music, specifically vocals, on day 51 but I was also pretty sure I would not have time for anything. Turns out I didn’t have time for much. No vocalizing for me yesterday.

I did add two new songs to the list. No real instruments yet, but all of the music has been worked out including the melodies and lyrics. They are songs 46 and 47. I also managed to mix one song. Yet another song with really crappy vocals. Hooray.

I’m not sure how the time is going to work out this week. I have three days in the office coming up and there will be one late night when I will check seeing a band off of my I-have-to-see-them-before-I-(or-they-or-we)-die bucket list. I’ll try to get short bursts of musical work in whenever I can.

Oh yeah, and spoiler alert for tomorrow…

Comics

The Disney+ Marvel page has a list of movies and TV shows that you should watch in preparation for Avengers Doomsday, which comes out… someday. A few months from now?

I started watching the list this weekend. It starts with the first two X-Men movies. I had seen them before (I saw the first one in the theater) but I didn’t really remember much about them. I was surprised by how… goofy? Is that the word? How goofy the fight choreography was. Like… CGI kung fu moves and stuff. I was not really prepared to see how much the MCU has upped the action movie game. Interesting.

Now it is Sunday night and I will be going to bed soon. Before that I am going to watch the new episode of Lanterns on HBOMax. Season one episode two. Will it be as good as episode one? I hope so, that one was pretty good.

2026 50/90 Challenge Day 50/90

Day 50 has come and gone. You know, as I typed that I had a thought… I sure hope I didn’t forget to update the title of the posts one time, thus throwing off the count of the days. I think yesterday was day 50 but I could be wrong via typo or something.

Yesterday was pretty good. I put rhythm guitars on three songs. They were the only guitar parts I had ready to go. After that it was all about lyrics and melodies. I banged out four songs worth. I tried starting a fifth but my brain sort of shut off at that point and I couldn’t come up with any more.

I’m hoping day 51 (today) will have some vocal tracking and maybe some lead guitars as well. We’ll see. There’s a lot going on today.

Saturday

Last week we took Robin Sparkles the cat to the vet. We put her in the cat carrier and felt just awful about it. It is the closest I will ever come to feeling like a nazi.

Today we did the same thing with Lily. Like… if I feel this awful doing this to a cat, how could I ever even imagine doing it to a human?

Lily spent the whole day at the vet. I tried to cheer myself up with other things.

DSCN0326

Yesterday my step daughter spent most of the day packing. Tomorrow we’re going to help her load up the u-haul pod thingie that is in our driveway right now. That’s the plan for Sunday. Fortunately there won’t be any cats in cages to worry about.

2026 50/90 Challenge Day 49/90

What did I do on day 49? It was just yesterday but I totally forget. I think I added a new song idea. Just a couple of bass riffs in 3/4 time with a super fast tempo. That is idea/song number 45. Oh yeah, I mixed a song. This one. It might have been a decent song if not for the atrocious singing. Oh well.

I think that’s all for day 49. Here’s hoping for something more substantial on day 50… but don’t hold your breath.

Weird Day

Today was a weird day. Nothing bad happened. Nothing went wrong. Everything was fine. Despite all of that though, it was super crazy stressful. Like, woah! The stress! I did score some Letters to Cleo tickets for a show in November though so that’s cool.