Back from vacation! and why I'm delaying release (slightly)

I had a wonderful time on vacation last week! ❤️ I met a lot of amazing people and got to spend time with some of my best friends in the world. Pre-Release Weekend was a blast too! I'm going to leave the pre-release masters up on my website for now so everyone who got a QR code can still access the album at their leisure. Most of the tracks will remain basically the same for final release, so, enjoy! (and if you do enjoy, please don't forget to listen on spotify and tell your friends once the full public release is out!)

So... if everything is basically ready, why are we delaying? Something's been gnawing at me. Earlier this week I had a meeting with John Caviness (my mixing/production assistant on The Queen of Time) and we've agreed to go back and re-do some elements of the mix/balance on All Along the Western Side before release. As much as I want this album to be done ASAP, I think this is the right decision.

All Along the Western Side was the first song I worked on with John, and, at that time, certain elements of our workflow were still budding and yet to be established. Frankly, the stems I gave him were a *mess.* Things were tragically disorganized, and while it was in his hands I continued to add and remove parts and re-track things, and send him new stems, and tell him to remove this and that and YIKES! I was new to this! I was very naive to the actual reality of having someone else to lend their hands/ ears to my mix- I was still learning what I could expect from this process.

My biggest lesson learned: People (no matter how smart they are) cannot read your mind. Nobody (no matter how experienced) knows your song as well as you do. You have to tell them what's going on in your mix or they won't know! Receiving a batch of unorganized stems is disorienting! You have to be proactive, specific, and organized in detailing the elements of your song when you give someone your stems to work on. They won't be able to make magic happen if they have to spend hours combing through your obscurely labeled tracks.

By this point in the project we are much more on the same page about what rolls each of us plays in the mixing process, and how give each other what we need to make the best work happen. As the project has gone on, John has also become more familiar with my sound, and has a better idea what textures, and parts to emphasize in my mixes. It's not that the current mix for All Along the Western Side is *bad*, it just stands out a bit from the rest of the album- frankly, it sounds a bit like it was mixed by someone else.

From the outset, this has been one of my favorite songs on the album, and whenever I've shown versions of the album to friends and family- many have highlighted it as one of their favorites too.

Of course, like all things in art/creativity, I can't know if the result of our re-balancing this mix will be *better* than the current version of the mix until it is done... So for all I know, we may end up going forward with the current mix anyway 😅. But I sought some advice from another producer who I interviewed at the start of this phase of the project, and he agreed that it's definitely worth a little delay to try to fix the things that will keep you up at night... and the end of this track *does* threaten to keep me up at night...

The finale of this song wants to be huge, and in my demo mix, I hear a ton of melodies, synths, and percussion elements that just *do not* shine through in the current mix. I didn't realize how diminished all these tracks were until I had some time away from the song and got to listen to it with fresh ears after I got the first round of masters...

There's something that happens to you once you've listened to/worked on a song a lot- it's like "listening in 4D." You hear what's there now, but you also hear the song's past iterations, and all of its future potential, all at once!.. Sometimes you can lose sight of the actual truth of the mix, and blend what you are currently hearing with your memory/ knowledge of the elements you are supposed to be hearing. I think that's what happened to this mix somewhere along the way. It's going to be a few more weeks before we can dive in and re-work the mix (John is about to leave for his own vacation soon)... So in the mean time I'll be doing what I'm always doing- writing, editing and mixing ✨new stuff <3✨