Valhalla VintageVerb

Me and Hank

After finishing The Gathering, I was directionless. No idea what to do. Also, the week has been getting long and while the dog has been pretty well-behaved and accommodating of my musical endeavors, I’ve been getting tired early. I came up with the basic hook of the song and then decided that that was good enough. It’s time for bed. I was asleep before 11pm, which is a rarity. Even better, Olive let me sleep through the night. Olive is a Berger Picard,2behr-ZHAY … Continue reading

The Sentinel

Mary left this morning for an extended business trip, so I’m a single-parent for the next week. And Olive, our 9-month old puppy is a harsh and jealous mistress. She’s matured a lot in the last few weeks, but she still needs a ton of attention and exercise. Now this may come as a surprise, but the writing music process doesn’t do so well with interruptions every 5-15 minutes. With this in mind, I figured I’d write something that could tolerate the interruptions and worked on another drone. I’ve been experimenting with various textures, and a lot of … Continue reading

This Isn’t What You Think It Is

Despite my best intentions to start reasonably early in the day, dog sitting and hanging out with the neighbors led to me not getting this one rolling until later in the evening on the 31st. Once again, I’m trying to work a day ahead. And in increasingly typical fashion, the song you hear today is a completely different one from what I was initially working on. This often happens to me and in the past, I would have just trashed the original project. The normal process is I find a sound or melody or hook that sounds interesting and start … Continue reading

Those Who Crossed the Line

Note: This post was written in 2025 and backdated to appear on the day I wrote and published the track. This is my third attempt at completing 29 tracks during a leap year. The two previous leap years were interrupted by travel, but I was able to carve out the entire month this year. It ended up not being as much of a hurdle as I thought, though I’m quite certain it would have been more intimidating in 2016 or 2020 because I hadn’t yet hit my “I can do this” stride. After the production excess of Red Hill Danger … Continue reading

Heat Before Serving

Note: This post was written in 2025 and backdated to appear on the day I wrote and published the track. Either it’s getting close to the end of the month, I’m running out of ideas, or I’m just in a groove making Lo-Fi. Well, it’s actually probably a little of all three columns. For the last several years, I’ve had an unwritten “never do the same genre two days in a row” rule for Song-A-Day. Actually, it’s not really a rule, but more of a guiding principle. The underlying questions I have for myself is why do I have that … Continue reading