Residing in newborn-baby land for the past month, shy of any alertness or creativity, I am indeed still alive, though my communication has been equivalent to nil. This winter/spring calendar has hands-down been the bleakest I have ever known as far as getting and securing work/shows/income. In some ways for us, it’s not much different than any other month of any other year. We live in a recession each and every month, never really knowing where the next paycheck is going to come from. But church budgets are way down, and since that is where I play the vast majority of my shows, we have noticed a definite slowdown in our little cottage economy. Sweating bullets.
But the flipside to all this is that I’ve been home a LOT to help (as much as a male possibly can) my wife in the transition from one to two kids. As a breadwinning male, I have found myself in the middle of a workweek playing with Ellis in the backyard sandbox or fixing peanut butter sandwiches fighting not only the noonday demon of acedia, but the very distinct and cruel head voice saying to me, “So here you are, you lazy sack. You can’t even provide for your family, you worthless loser of a phony artist.” Such are my days of late. Low self-esteem is a plague riddled with guilt.
Ben [Shive] has been wrapping up a couple of other projects before we make the final push to finish my ghost of an album. I’ve officially titled the project Chrome, which I will explain in a later post. The release date, obviously, won’t be anytime in March, and April is looking mighty doubtful. I’m still hopeful for a May release, but this train is, and has been, a slow one, so by now I should know better than to make any promises when it comes to these sort of things. What I can give you is a sneak peek at the album cover (or something close):