The Album

Today I'm working on a new covers album. Years ago my friend Matt Ketteman and I recorded one that is now available on iTunes, called Follow Through. It was fun to record and a few tracks have sold moderately well. We always wanted to do another, and recently on a visit to Brooklyn, Matt recorded vocal tracks for 11 songs. Now I've got to do all the music.

But before I start, I do my daily scanning of a few blogs, including Seth Godin's. One of his posts mentioned how some companies build their business to get people to spend more money. For a musician like me, that's the equivalent of getting people to download the whole album on iTunes instead of just a song or two. Think about any Pink Floyd album, or Led Zeppelin IV, or Coltrane's A Love Supreme... even in the digital age you don't buy single tracks off those, you want the whole album!

I don't know if this can be truly achieved with an album of cover songs, but I'll see what I can do. More importantly, this is going to be THE focus of my next trio album. I've already started writing the music, and the goal is to make it a cohesive work, start to finish. There will be individual songs of course, all worthy of their own listening, but in the context of the whole album each piece becomes stronger. This is an old concept, but it's been abandoned by many artists and producers over the years. I'm not aiming for commercialism though, I want artistry.