So the story goes

Maybe some people - good looking girls for instance - go through life experiencing positivity and acceptance from everyone they meet. Who doesn't want to be friends with and be closer to a good looking girl? Or a good looking guy I guess. I feel like I get negativity and animosity from everyone, everywhere I turn. I guess that is an exaggeration, I don't experience it from everybody. But I've felt like I had random animosity thrown in my face my whole life, I still don't understand it - the only thing I can think of to explain it is the fact that I'm just different, right down to my physical appearance and onto the way I think (which definitely is different). Maybe this is all mental, in which case it's a self fulfilling policy. I credit my parents for my original lack of self confidence but I have noone to blame but myself that it continues on to this day. My wife asked me the other day, something to the effect of 'you should hang out with so and so, they seem to be people you'd get along with...' and I answered - 'I feel totally alien in this world, I don't feel like I can relate to anybody'.

I still make electronic music sometimes

A stem I made in Logic over the weekend, when I didn't have my guitar available and needed a musical outlet:

10feb10.mp3

Mixtape 2/11/10

Passionate Introverts (Dinosaurs) - A Sunny Day In Glasgow
Troll Nacht - The Dodos
Masterswarm - Andrew Bird
What Would I Want? Sky - Animal Collective
Heartbeats (The Knife) - Jose Gonzalez
Fine For Now - Grizzly Bear
Skinny Love - Bon Iver
Silver Soul (Album) - Beach House
Shelter - The xx
One Life Stand (Album Version) - Hot Chip
(My Head) - Times New Viking
My little Japanese Cigarette Case - Spoon
Ready, Able - Grizzly Bear
Boy Lilikoi - Jonsi

Ever so slowly

Another good day of guitar practice, recorded another youtube vid. I feel like I'm establishing a good pace of creativity - I have pretty much a song written that I'm satisfied with (at this point) and I have a bunch of videos up. By the end of the year I'll have several original songs hopefully, and dozens of youtube vids - that's good. I worked on music a lot last weekend because I'm going away next weekend and I may not have much time to practice guitar.

Jose Gonzalez interviews

He discusses his songwriting process a little at the beginning, and the recording process towards the end.



Another interview where he discusses his songwriting and recording process.

Quick update

Lyric writing, finished song lyrics. Guitar practice, came up with tentative riffs/arrangement.

A phantom and a fly

Reading on songwriting, not much time to do anything last night. Have been thinking about musical direction - I think I'm starting to get caught up in the sequencing and mixing, which is cool if I wanted to be an electronic artist or something - but I'm a guitar player, and the original idea of the album was to make an organic sounding guitar album with a lot of fingerpicking and minimal instrumentation. This means the song is everything. Instead of playing around with Logic plugins everyday, which is fun I'll admit - I have to work on songs. Life is also calling - feeling some (mostly internal) pressure to get back to the business of taking charge of my career. I have to schedule some time everyday to spend some extra time on work projects and studying for professional certifications. I also bought some moleskines for lyric writing and song notes, not sure if I'm going to use them.