Wednesday, July 28th

As expected, we mixed until 2 O'clock this morning. It was a long night, but a very productive one. We worked Ghostly Writer, a dry, dark ballad that I wrote four months ago and it truly evolved into one of the most intriguing entries on this project. I actually ditched two acoustic ballads that I originally thought would be on this project for this one. Casey and I love the song because it breaks convention and artistically speaking, is a homerun. It started out as a simple, dark folk tune and 30 tracks later grew into a truly remarkable piece of work full with a violin trio and at least a dozen finger picking acoustic lines. Absolutely beautiful!

Our mixing sessions are sort of serve and volley where we bounce things off of each other and Casey presents options and choices for us to make. We have a good chemistry working together and last night we went back and forth on tweaking the vocals for Ghostly until we could find the perfect sounds.

I took a copy of Ghostly Writer home last night and made a list of detailed notes for us to go by in our mixing session tonight. This is absolutely the most important phase of the entire project. I listen to every word of every song for mistakes, intonation issues, pronunciation problems and more. We hope to finish Ghostly tonight, go back and re-track some vocals on Time and maybe jump into mixing either The Hill or Wouldn't Change A Thing.

I approved the final Proofs of the Artwork today and my art designer uploaded the files this afternoon. From here, I will receive a final set of proofs from Discmakers to approve. Once this happens, we will be a go with pressing as soon as the master is done and shipped.

One thing occurs to me each night that I work and drive away at 2 in the morning........When this project is done, people will pop the cd in a player or hit the mp3s and say....."Hmm Nice Music". It is just not possible for anyone to even begin to know about the amount of work that goes into something like this. But, isn't that always the story when something is written or created, the real story is always a mystery and the only ones who ever realize the work are the ones who wrote or created it. Kind of interesting!

Ok, another long night ahead, I will update you tomorrow on our progress.

Have a great day!