As this spring semester comes to an end, and I go through the process of helping my graduate students have their charts played by the university big band, and get ready to do their culminating projects [like a thesis], I started reminiscing about the big band chart I didfor my master's project when I was in graduate school. I am just now realizing that it's exactly 20 years ago since I recorded this, so it seemed like a good time to post and share it for nostalgia. Also I feel really old...
Photo Shoots, Shoot outs, and a tick...
Recently Kurt and I had a photo shoot since we were running out of images to get us through the Year of the Groove. It's always kind of funny to me when, from the outside looking in, my life might seem a little extra glamorous for a day. I always feel like I need to make clear to people that it is only a mirage. And it's not even that people around me think my life is glamorous, because all they need to do is come to my house and see that my recycling is piling up, I only fold my laundry once a season, and nothing more than 12" back in my fridge is probably safe for human consumption. But online, it's so easy to filter what gets posted, and only allow the majority of acquaintances to get a glimpse of the highlights. [Don't we all do this? This is why we should never compare ourselves to others.]
The Story Behind "It's You I Love"
This month's release was one of our "in case of emergency, break glass" releases for the Year of the Groove. We had planned to put out a song I wrote called "Human" this month, but after talking about the promotional angles, we decided to wait on that one until we could properly line things up and not rush. So, we pulled out this track that was never officially released, polished up the mix, mastered it, and sent it through the pipeline. It would have been released eventually on an EP I've got planned in my head, but I'm excited it's out there now because I actually really love this track and I'm glad to be able to talk about how it came about.
When others give away what we worked so hard on...
One of the most frustrating and disheartening parts of releasing music in today's digital music marketplace is when perfect strangers take it upon themselves to freely give away the music that we have worked so hard on, and paid so much to create, thus discouraging the few remaining buyers from actually properly purchasing our work. After releasing our first record in 2007, one day I set up a Google alert so that any time a website was found with "Worldwide Groove Corporation" or "Chillodesiac" in the page contents, we would get an email with a link. Little did I know that within the next week I would get dozens of email alerts directing me to blogs where people [who make a habit of doing this regularly] had uploaded our album artwork and all of the music into downloadable files so people could just help themselves to our work without even connecting with or compensating us.
The Story Behind Standard Chill...
Since this month's release is comprised of all cover tunes, instead of songwriting, I'm going to talk just a little bit about the creative and production process. And I'm glad to have the opportunity to do this because many of the tracks were part of our Chillodesiac Lounge album and I've never told that story. We were originally going to only release the brand new track Our Love Is Here to Stay for February in honor of Valentine's Day in our Year of the Groove, but as we formulated the release schedule, it seemed like we might as well throw the other jazz standards on the release since many people may not have been familiar with our previous releases and it makes sense to have them all together in one place...
The Story Behind Glitter & Bliss.
Glitter & Bliss is one of those tracks that had a rather unorthodox path to the final version you hear. Most of the tracks we are releasing during our Year of the Groove have come about in one of two ways. Either it was a track Kurt started and then I wrote the lyric and melody over the top [which in songwriting is called "top lining"], or I write the song on my own and then do a rough demo and then present it to Kurt...