IJ in Maui on the lanai with a beer…

Winter on the wetcoast can be a grey and dreary affair, but for me this last month has been anything but dreary.  At the end of January I spent a marvelous 9 days in Maui with my husband, and only last weekend I was back at the spa with my fabulous friends on our annual getaway.  What a spoiled brat I am!

To top the whole month off, I have finally managed to finish recording my last CD…one that has taken me over 10 years to complete.  I’ve been pondering the question of why it has taken me so long;  the last CD I released was in 2000, and I actually released two of them very close together.   “Catnip” and “undressed” came when I was at the top of my game, having a very prolific period of writing, recording and performing.  But at this point, I haven’t written a song for several years, I have stopped performing completely, and finishing this latest project has been such a long and arduous process.  What gives?

My only conclusion is that I was hijacked by personal events and menopause.  When I first got married and started having children the same thing happened.  Life got in the way of that self-centredness that is needed to write and/or record.  You can’t be so terribly self-involved when you’re raising kids.  But as they got a little older I was able to, for little bits of time, run upstairs and finish my first recording, Foolishly Fantasizing.  And in my 40’s I was a lot freer to do those kinds of things, so writing and recording and performing became more of a focus.  But menopause brought that all to an abrupt halt.

Okay, I guess it wasn’t really abrupt; it probably snuck up on me gradually and then became very apparent in my late 40’s and into my 50’s.  The inability to concentrate, the moodiness (which, you would think, would somehow drive some kind of creativity, but it didn’t), the depressing physical symptoms, all came together in the form of a ‘writus interruptous’ and my usual creative flow was gone.  And other personal challenges with my family didn’t help either.

So it was with great shock that I sat down two weeks ago and realized that I had actually finished the recording of “Shades of Grey”.  And yesterday I came very close to finishing the mastering stage.  For those of you who don’t know anything about recording, the mastering process in recording is like the final polish on a sculpture or the framing of a painting;  it essentially balances and equalizes all of the recorded songs so that they work together as a collection on a CD.

Now I’m very aware that in the 10 years since my last release, the music world has changed considerably.  It isn’t as much about collections of songs in a CD these days;  now it’s about “singles” the way it was back in the 50’s and 60’s.  You can simply put one song at a time out there in the universe and possibly see some sales from it on its own, but for me this is a collection of songs that all belong together.  The subjects of the songs range from longing and lust and letting go, to recognizing the reality of relationships, to getting older.  I’ve always been attracted to writing about what I consider the “grey areas” of life, so the CD title is a play on the word grey which is also the colour of a few strands of my hair these days!

And in a way, there is something very final and finished about it.  I said to my husband a year ago that I just wanted to get it done.  And if I never write again, at least I will feel that I’ve finished something rather than just letting it all just hang there.  So I am finally reaching that point.  Once the CD is done and the cover, which is being designed by myself and my daughter, is finished, I’ll announce it here.  You’ll be able to sample bits of it and I’ll likely do another blog entry just about the songs themselves.  So stay tuned.

Now that I think of it, maybe the events of the last last few years will give me a new crop of songs!  You just never know…

IJ