Dark Thoughts

Only 8 weeks to go to the wedding and everything is moving along like a train. Jode's and I have got a pretty full calender, even though if feels as though we are barely getting out of the house. Cakes, suit's, reception, topiary, dancing, music, wine's, etc, etc all need to be finalized and paid for. Everything is booked, but it's the details that need to be sorted out.

Taking a step back from all of this, I am quite amazed by just how organized Jode's has been in getting this all sorted out. I think if I had been left in sole responsibility for this, then I'd be running around and panicking about now. I don't know how she's managed to keep it all (and me) all organized and in line.

Jode's is back at work now. She's temping, but I think that it's something that she'll kind of enjoy (as much as one can enjoy working). Not being tied down to one employer, and having the flexibility to have time off, is going to fit in with the way she works. Ideally a part time job would suit her best, but they are a bit thin on the ground at the moment. The next best thing is temping for a few months, and having a month off, in which she can do her art and unwind.

I've just had her easel fixed and bough her some new backing boards after we had an accident with the last backing board, snapping the shelf off her easel. Hopefully, everything in the studio is getting sorted into a good work environment for her. Except for all my mess of course. I need to spend a day or so out there, re-organizing the studio and clearing away all of the unnecessary bits and pieces. We need to get some more pastels for Jodes, that have a different, softer texture. I don't really understand it all, but she says it will make it easier to layer the colours, which makes sense. Now that we have some more money coming in, I want to start puting some money aside for them, so that we can get them in a month or so.

I gave her a full set of Rembrandt pastels a couple of years ago, on the condition that they all end up as stubby little well used bit's or pastel. Well, she's not quite to that stage yet, but they have been well used, and she's made a few amazing pieces of art, that we've framed and put up in the house. You can check them out at her website

Last night I finished out wedding waltz after fussing over it for a few weeks, and generally avoiding it. It's a great feeling to have it finished, and I'm really happy with the way it turned out. It's kind of dark and solemn, but not in a depressing way. More of an understated elegance - like getting really dressed up, with a very refined style, but without going over the top and getting tacky. It's spacious and glorious, but also simple. It's written very much from the heart, and is a song of feeling. That's one of the reason's why I found it difficult to work on it. It's such an important piece of music to us both, and I didn't want to get it wrong. It can be tricky getting the right feeling into a piece of music.

I have the feeling in my heart, but the technical aspects of recording and problem solving can sometimes cause the head to get in the way, or for the feeling to get lost somewhere in the recording process.

That's one of the things that I miss a little about the old days, when I had a very minimal studio setup. A lack of cables and technical complexity, meant that it was much easier to get the feeling into a song, but often the sonic results were quite underwhelming due to the limitations of the equipment. Now, the sonic results are great, but sometimes the character of the songs is missing.

Not this time I'm pleased to say.

Perhaps that's why the composers of old, have so much feeling and emotion in their songs, because they simply wrote it on paper, in their own special language. There was no technology to get in the way. Like a poet, scratching out their feelings onto parchment, the composers of old, could just let the feeling flow out onto the paper. Of course, they were necessarily brilliant, to know the sounds in their heads, and to put them into a written form, but at least they didn't have the barriers of 20 layers of technology to wrestle with on the way.

Anyway, I've got a volume of laboratory procedures sitting in front of me, summoning my attention, so I'd better get back to it.