“Picture This”
In the almost 50 years I have made commercially available recordings (I made the first one when I was 15 years old), the recording world has changed greatly.
Of course, in the beginning of my career, vinyl discs (45RPM singles and 33RPM LPs) were the creative medium. Later of course this evolved to cassettes and then CDs.
Now we are in the era of the digital download and other forms of digitized delivery.
The demise of a physical product replete with artwork you can actually hold in your hand depresses me a bit. But as Yogananda would rightly say, “be the willow and not the oak.”
In other words, don’t hold on to anything too tightly.
The planning of an album was always a lot of fun for me. I took to it much as I would assume a novelist plots a book. The sequencing of tracks in an order that created a sense of drama was something I took seriously and only recently became somewhat quite adept at. But the music world aims at marketing individual tracks or songs these days.
My last album (which quite literally may be just that) is therefore my best effort.
“Picture This,” unlike my other records was not initially available in the digital download domain for that precise reason. It was only available by direct order on my website or at my gigs. In the past couple of weeks, it has been made available on digital download sites such as:
CDBaby
Amazon Music
iTunes
Deezer
In the end, I too, ended up having to conform to the new reality.
If I write and record songs from here on in, I may only make videos and have them available on YouTube.
For now I am getting friendly with the idea that my back catalog must speak for itself.
Or maybe I can go back to oil painting.