as i put the finishing touches on my upcoming EP "Broken Homes in Bexar County" i've started to work quite a bit on my next album, which will be a full-length. the songs i've posted more recently -- "the first time" and "the restoration of the western shoreline" -- will be on it.
a little while back i said i was going to call it "heard scenes", which is ok i guess, but i've been thinking about a slightly different direction for it. most of the songs are shaping up to be about the events of the last decade or so, and even the ones like "the first time" that are more upbeat are tinged with a little bit of longing for lost innocence or whatever, so i'm going to call it "The Zero Years", which i think is a pretty cool name and struck me as being a good label for the 2000s, especially for those of us frustrated with the bush administration and the harsh and often hollow culture that existed in the country at that time (and still lingers even while there's been a little bit of daylight recently).
i've talked a little about this before, but i'm approaching the recording much differently than i approached "Broken Homes". for one thing, i used a lot of virtual instruments and digital processing on the "Broken Homes" stuff, and while the slightly synthetic nature of that sound gave the EP a weird vibe that felt right for those songs, lately i've been trying to work with only sounds that i record myself. i've been mixing field-recorded samples with an acoustic folk and early rock-n-roll sound, and i'm getting excited about what i've been able to come up with, so i think i'm getting close to nailing an aesthetic for the album that i'm making.
it looks like, realistically, "Broken Homes" won't be on sale until at least mid-September, and i can't decide if it would be cooler to release "The Zero Years" at the very end of 2009 or at the very beginning of 2010, but i'll probably do it in early 2010 anyway just to give the two releases a tiny bit of breathing room.
