Hey O Way O

Do you remember the children's book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day? Just substitute "year" and that pretty much sums up 2017. I don't want to talk about it.

My readership (both of you) may have noticed that I haven't written a blog post since April 2017. Yeah, I have pretty much stopped blogging in favor of writing in my journal. I use an app called Day One, and if you have any interest in keeping a journal on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, I can heartily recommend it. I started in July 2014 and now, 1,266 days and 3,055 journal entries later, I'm still writing two or three entries a day. I guess I still like to write.

And I still like to make music, even when things are crappy. I've written maybe a dozen songs in 2017 and recorded a few with my friend and producer Roger Lavallee. Roger and I have been working on music together since 2002 and he is totally amazing as a guitarist, drum programmer, arranger, producer, and engineer. I decided to share our latest "nearly complete" song on SoundCloud today. It's part of a long-rumored 2015, oops, 2016, oops, 2017, oops, 2018 album project.

This song is a quirky sort of pep talk to a friend. Or something. It's called "Hey O Way O" because, why not? I say that a lot in the song. The lyrics are on the SoundCloud page if you're interested. This happens to be the first song we completed in Studio One 3 after using Cakewalk Sonar for many years (Roger is a ProTools guy but he adapts amazingly well to new recording software). The goal is to make music, whatever the tools, but Studio One (S1) has a clean and modern interface that really makes it easy to learn and use. I jumped ship when I heard that parent company Gibson is stopping development of Cakewalk products. A half-price Black Friday sale also helped ($200 for the Professional version). It's nice that most of the plugins I have for Sonar work with S1 too.

Let's all hope that 2018 will be a better year for all of us. Cheers!