It's an exciting time for me right now, and probably for many people, but let's talk about me. I had an excellent show last night at Hotel Chelsea in Second Life, I am about to embark on my first vacation in over two years, and my band They Stole My Crayon released a single this week... our first new music that's been put out since our album debuted in 2016. Whew! That's a lot of cool stuff. Let's start at the end and work our way back.
New Crayon Tune
Here's the deal with this. Like many bands, when we were deciding what to include on the debut album for They Stole My Crayon, we'd written more songs than we were going to include on the album. In fact, we briefly considered having our debut be a "double album", which was more of a thing in the days when music had to be on a tangible physical piece of media. But back to the point: we'd written way more songs than the 12 that ended up on the album. Some of those songs never even made it to the stage of creating a demo; others got to the demo stage but then languished. And at least three of those songs were practically finished and were serious contenders for inclusion on the album, but just didn't make it over the finish line before we set a release date for the album. This happens a lot, trust me.
After the album was released, it was our initial plan to come out with our second release soon thereafter, but then life happened. Regardless, we continued working on those and other songs that we subsequently wrote. One of those songs was "Box By The Cliff", a tune based on a demo that Bunny had done and that we all loved. We tried it out a couple of different ways in terms of how we treated the vocals and instrumental arrangement, but ultimately wanted to keep the spooky vibe of Bunny's original demo. We ended up having Christina handle the lead vocals on it, with Bunny's ghostly voice echoing her parts. I added some ambient guitar parts and bass, we screwed around with the drums and rhythmic sounds, and... that was it.
Fast forward a couple of years. I'd been itching to release something new from The Crayon... and keep in mind, we've been continuing to work on new tunes that are in various stages of completion. But "Box By The Cliff" felt like it wasn't going to get any cooler by trying to push it beyond its lo-fi state, so we did a once-over on the mix, did a quick master, and bang-zoom... a new single. It's available now on Bandcamp, and in a month you'll be able to hear it via all streaming services (Spotify, iTunes and all the rest).
That's right. After more than two years that, at least for me, included a ton of craziness above and beyond a global pandemic, I'm finally going to take some time off work and get away from these four walls that have been my home and self-imposed prison for far too long. Christina and I are going back to our favorite magical place: Joshua Tree, CA. I'm sure I'll have some stories to share upon my return.
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