some thoughts on “in 4 the evening”….

The album is a wrap. It has been shipped off via cyberspace and is at the ‘mastering spa’ (Brian Hazard’s Resonance Mastering) to get ‘prettified.’

Most of last week was spent doing final tweaks on the final mixes – mostly minor, a couple of major ones – with only “Paradise by the Lava Lamp” escaping this fate. But now, all is done and it’s on to other things – finalizing the CD – in support of  ”In 4 the Evening.”

This week, when the masters come back, look for a release and free download of an advance track from the album, either “Paradise by the Lava Lamp” or “Piñon Incense,” probably the latter. 

It’s been a long, strange, and sometimes intense journey these last 11 months since the first album was released last June (the debut album took only 8 months, this one took 11… I know, I’ve been slacking – Nights on Venus is still not even 2 years old yet and you know how toddlers are). A few thoughts and (possibly) interesting facts about the album…

Originally, when I started recording some new songs in late June and July of last year, they were for what I thought was only going to be an EP to be released by the end of 2011. By the beginning of last August I’d come up with a title: the album would be called “In 4 the Evening,” a loose concept based almost entirely on Noel Kerns’ photograph of the ‘Futuro House’ which became the front cover of the album.

Full image of the “Futuro House”…. photograph by Noel Kerns.

Personally, I like the idea of ‘concept’ albums, even if they’re loosely-based ones. It keeps the musical ideas more focused around a central theme – otherwise there could be the tendency to include a lot of eclectic and divergent ideas which could end up making the album sound a tad disjointed (I’m real big on cohesiveness these days – didn’t used to be).

I was already familiar with Noel’s work since I’d used his photograph of Stanley Marsh’s ‘Cadillac Ranch’ near Amarillo for the cover of the first album. I love night photography, especially when it features ruins or abandoned places, and I love his work. He has a book coming out of his photography – if it’s not out already – called “Nightwatch: Painting with Light” and you can find it here on Amazon (also, check out the link under Blogroll at right to check out some of his work on Flickr).

The ‘Futuro House’ is kind of interesting in itself… the story goes that apparently these structures were some type of pre-fab housing that were manufactured in the late 1940′s after the war and you could buy one for a few hundred bucks, have yours set up wherever you wanted and actually live in it. A few of them still exist in Texas, where the photograph was taken, although since the construction is metal, it’s hard to imagine actually living in one of these things as they would become the equivalent of a dutch oven in the summer. Put a few swamp coolers on top of it?

Anyway, I knew I wanted to use the image on the cover and organized kind of a loose concept for the album around it and the whole idea of just ‘staying in,’ ‘staying home’ and songs for the evening… which turned out to be unusually prophetic. I was still living in Dallas at the time and still thinking this was going to be an EP. By the time I moved back to Colorado and moved in with my girlfriend, Erin,  another couple of songs had been recorded and the EP was becoming a full-blown album.

The prophetic part of the album title – and somewhat ironic as well in its prophetic-ness – came about when I got back up to Golden. Erin’s mother has been living here as well over these last 6 months (actually slightly longer);  Lee is 83 years old and has Alzheimer’s, so Erin and I tag team up on caring for her here during the days and nights – with supplemental help from a local home health care service as needed – and apart from a quick overnight jaunt down to Santa Fe to see Todd Rundgren in concert at the end of March, we have literally been “In 4 the Evening”… every night. If you’ve been following this blog, you also know there’s been the move to a larger house thrown in there as well. Fortunately, both Erin and I tend to be ‘homebodies’; as we’ve been doing this, it’s been something of a running joke between us about how the album title ‘manifested’ itself in a very real and unforeseen way (funny how life works).

As for the new album… the songs are more stylistically diverse, slightly more uptempo and shorter, and in contrast to the first album, not quite as moody and introspective – in fact, they’re almost downright ‘happy.’ I think it’s a stronger album overall… and it arrives May 27th on CD Baby, iTunes, et al. CDs may take a little longer initially – working on distribution details right now – and will be available through Amazon, CD Baby, and the NoV website… which I now need to start updating.

Until next time…

“In 4 the Evening,” the 2nd album… release date May 27, 2012

The Nights on Venus debut album is currently available as a digital download (MP3) and can be found on CDBaby, iTunes, Amazon.mp3, eMusic, and other fine online retailers. The new album “In 4 the Evening” will be released May 27th, 2012.

Follow Craig and Nights on Venus on Twitter (@xlntsky) and Facebook.

final mixes: some thoughts on mastering prep….

Down to the last week of doing final mixes on “In 4 the Evening“… it’s ‘crunch time’ as the sportscasters say. A few more things are known now: the album goes to mastering by May 8th; Brian Hazard at Resonance Mastering will be doing the mastering work again as he did on the first album. I liked the work he did on the first album last year and he’s a Depeche Mode, Cure, and Smiths-influenced guy so he understands the sound I’m trying to get. I highly recommend him.

And the official release date for the album is now set for May 27th – Memorial Day weekend. “In 4 the Evening” will be available as both a digital download (MP3) album and also on CD through CD Baby, iTunes, Amazon and all the usual online outlets.

Front cover.................................... Back cover

Here at la casa NoV, if the house/move was the project that ate the month of March, final mixing the album was the project that ate the month of April. Our cat Maxx has been a constant companion down in the Mancave with me during the month o’ mixing and on a few late night sessions, I can attest to the effectiveness of 5-Hour Energy drink, Extra Strength, which does exactly what it says it will do, better than coffee (reminds me of the Jolt cola days in grad school).

All songs have now gone through the first final mixdown process – I do two, because this is after all, the last chance you have to get your best sound out of what you’ve recorded before it hits the streets where it’s more or less set in stone (unless you do a re-mix, re-master at a later date) and where it will be judged… for-ev-er. OK, maybe that’s a little overly dramatic, but your album will now be ‘out there’…

A few things encountered along the way and learned with this release:

1) Don’t upgrade your software in the middle of an album. If you’re a computer-based musician, it may be tempting to get those extra bells and whistles in the new software package and start incorporating them into what you’re doing, but you will probably be creating extra work for yourself at the back end. I went from Reason 4 to 6 on this album, mainly because Reason 6 integrated the previously standalone Record software into it for a more seamless recording workflow and while that’s a very good thing and it is easier…  now, I had to adjust my own working process to it and that took the better part of a month. There may also be compatibility issues between the new software and drivers for your external audio interface but they’re usually quickly resolved. Closely related to this is…

2) Expect the unexpected. A good example of this was provided when I started working on the final mix for “All Phenomena Are Dreams.” Since I recorded it last summer I expected there would be more work involved on this one – I just didn’t know how much. I’ve ended up pretty much re-mixing the entire song now but only after I discovered a routing problem in the recording connections by accident. “All Phenomena…” always sounded a little different from the others, like it was recorded in a cave or something and it was tough to EQ it correctly. At one point I considered leaving it off the album and going with another song that was more ready to go because it just wasn’t coming together.

Well, now we know why… Turns out when I added an echo effect module to one individual track it affected the drum track too and I went searching through the connections, found the culprit, and re-routed. It may have happened during the upgrade but more than likely it was probably there from almost the very beginning, the result of taking off another effect module somewhere else, so it’s good to always check your routing connections when you’ve made any changes, no matter how small.

In this case it worked out well – the song has never sounded better (at just the right time) – but it happened only by accident in the process of trying to improve the song and, as most artists will tell you, when they’re being honest, we live by the ‘happy accident.’ This is one of those and it wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

9-10 months is a long time when you’ve first recorded a song and when you come back to doing a final mix on it for mastering. In that amount of time, you’ll hear things differently than when you first recorded it and your skills in mixing (and troubleshooting) probably will have improved (perhaps exponentially!). For the reason of this time lag, I’ll probably release a couple of EPs of 3-4 songs (next) between full albums – the songs eventually end up on the album anyway.

3) Set your deadlines and meet them. If you’re on a record company roster, this is largely decided for you. If you’re doing everything yourself, you’re the ‘project manager’ so to speak, so develop a roll-out plan with milestones (logistics). As an Indie musician, you’re essentially running a small business (just don’t expect any small business loans from the government).

Releasing an album is an investment…. in yourself and your business.

As far as setting deadlines, build a little ‘slippage’ time into dates when things will be finished to account for the unexpected. Some things will probably take a little longer than expected and you want your album to be as good as possible, but it helps to have a plan for when things need to be done. It’s all in the details, including the ‘devil.’ Work as quickly as you can and if you start getting bogged down on mixing a song, move on to the next and come back to it – it’ll still be there (waiting patiently for you).

Indie is do-it-yourself music, synonymous for hard work and no sleep.

Yes, it is, and the process and journey is the best part.

"In 4 the Evening," the 2nd album... coming May, 2012

The Nights on Venus debut album is currently available as a digital download (MP3) and can be found on CDBaby, iTunes, Amazon.mp3, eMusic, and other fine online retailers. The new album “In 4 the Evening” will be released May 27th, 2012.

Follow Craig and Nights on Venus on Twitter (@xlntsky) and Facebook.

Grand Canyon - North Rim to South Rim in One Day

Reblogged from ryan johnson FILMS+PHOTOGRAPHY:

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It was an absolutely crazy idea, but it could be done.

My father-in-law had done it before, and he was the one that convinced my dad and I to do it with him and a friend. A four man team, crossing the Grand Canyon, North Rim to South Rim in one day. It would be like walking a marathon, but through the Grand Canyon.

Read more… 292 more words

Reblogged from Ryan Johnson Films + Photography.... very cool photos and if you've been to the Grand Canyon, quite a feat. Well done!

to CD or not CD?….

The ‘great move’ of 2012 is done, thankfully, and this past week or so, we have been settling in and getting organized. The remodeling contractors completed everything last week and haven’t been here for the last few days so things are a little more relaxed around here now. A couple more photos from the final transformation:

The kitchen at la nueva Casa NoV....

and the Dining area...

We’ve begun to get back to our more-or-less regular routine after the upheaval and hopefully we will be here for many, many years to come… unless of course a move higher up into the mountains becomes something doable.

and the new view out the kitchen window after last night's spring snow in the foothills.

Now, there’s only the album to complete (I say “only”).

I’ve begun doing the final mixdowns for mastering now and should be finished by the end of this month (self-imposed deadline, putting on the record company exec hat for a moment). There will be 10 songs on “In 4 the Evening.” Three songs didn’t make the final cut as they didn’t seem to be a ‘fit’; I hope to release those as an EP sometime in the late summer or early fall this year.

But back to the original question of this post… to CD or not CD?

For an indie artist and if you’re doing everything yourself it’s an important question to ask. I brought up a few thoughts on the CD issue in a previous post (“the end of the CD as we know it” http://wp.me/p1noGQ-tX) and I’ve been revisiting them lately as I’m putting the finishing touches on the album.

The CD format is supposedly going the way of the vinyl LP as far as new commercial releases for all but the biggest selling artists. There is the added expense of CD manufacturing as opposed to the more cost effective option of doing a digital-only (MP3) release. When you’re on a tight budget you have to think about it. But in the year since the Nights on Venus debut album came out as a digital-only release, I’ve had kind of a change of heart and mind on this.

For one thing, I read a few posts on Facebook and a couple of other forums by people in my age demographic who said they would never own an MP3 player and would not shop for albums on iTunes and other digital outlets. While at first that seemed to me to be a bit of a short-sighted position in the face of everything moving to digital files as the de facto music format, it also told me that for a certain number of listeners, this is probably the case. For whatever reason – maybe digital file downloads don’t seem as ‘real’ to them as something tangible you can hold in your hand like a CD, even though a CD has the digital .WAV files of the songs on them – they’re not going to switch, until they absolutely have to. They’re not ‘early adopters,’ but they’re still – or could be – part of your audience.

The takeaway here is that if you’re producing your own music and putting it out into the marketplace, you could be passing up both sales and a chance to expand your audience by not making the CD option available for that segment of listeners, not to mention the ‘impulse’ sales at your gigs.

I can kind of understand it. If you grew up in the golden era of vinyl, a record album was actually just that – the music on the vinyl LP, the record jacket and all the artwork and packaging. It was a total experience, and going to the record store was a big occasion. I know I could spend hours in one browsing, looking through the new releases and especially in the cut-out bins (remember those?) and it was a great way to spend an afternoon, doing just that – I miss that now and I’m betting more than a few people do. It’s probably one reason why when I opened Excellent Sky Gallery for my artwork in Empire, Colorado back in 2003, I also made it a used record store (and eventually a bookstore). Plus, I’ve just always loved records as far back as I can remember.

When CDs appeared on the scene and eventually took over the lion’s share of  existing shelf space (even pre-Best Buy), it was still sort of a similar experience – instead of LPs, you could browse through CDs and, for a while, if you wanted vinyl LPs, there was a certain amount of space left for them. Initially, the novelty of CDs made them just as cool as records had always been.

With MP3′s, there was a certain novelty factor as well but as we live in more accelerated times, novelty wears off more quickly too. For some people, I think MP3′s, digital downloads just seem more abstract, too nebulous – these things are floating around in cyberspace and you grab them out of thin air. What are you really getting? Well, the music of course, and a certain amount of convenience, but it’s not quite the ‘same.’ You don’t get the same overall experience even when you can browse online and listen to at least excerpts of songs before you buy.

I don’t think this is mere nostalgia or wanting to return just to old formats, but we have lost a lot in the inevitable march to the digital-only format. What we’re really doing when we create and record music is making memories for listeners and the artwork and packaging was a big part of that. Making another format option available, as an Indie budget will allow, seems to be the best way to go.

So the 2nd album from Nights on Venus - ”In 4 the Evening” – will be released on CD as well as in MP3 format. Release date will be sometime right around Memorial Day, May 28th (putting on my logistics hat now), just in time for summer as it is kind of a summer-y album.  The first album will also be available on CD as well a little later. Both will be available on CD through CD Baby, Amazon, and ReverbNation.

Indie is do-it-yourself music, synonymous for hard work and no sleep.

Yep, I don’t know who originally said this but it’s true, although there is some sleep involved.

In the future I hope to make some subsequent albums available on vinyl as well, i.e., as financial circumstances allow, which right now seems to be in the same realm as a move back to the mountains (someday…). A lot of well-known artists have been putting their music on vinyl for quite a few years now – Pearl Jam immediately comes to mind – and it’s good to see.  And who knows, maybe I’ll re-open the gallery and record store too (I still have my turntables for in-store listening)…

A COUPLE OF NEWS ITEMS THIS WEEK:

Translator - "Big Green Lawn" (2012)

80′s psychedelic power-pop band Translator releases their first album in 26 years – TODAY! You may remember their song, “Everywhere That I’m Not” from 1982 – they went on to record four excellent, and criminally overlooked, albums through 1986. They’re back with “Big Green Lawn,” available on iTunes. Like R.E.M., Translator was Indie and Alternative long before the terms became mainstream, so give them a listen. Full story and video here: http://www.rockcellarmagazine.com/2012/04/15/translator-band-debuts-new-video-soul-on-fire-from-upcoming-album-big-green-lawn/

Welcome back, guys! And the album sounds great!…

Early MC...

And another long-time fave, Marshall Crenshaw, has a current musical project underway that you can get involved with and contribute to. It’s a 6 EP Subscription Series of his music over the next 2 years. For more info, visit his page at Kickstarter, the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/788819149/marshall-crenshaw-ep-subscription-series There are 11 days left to fund his project.

Happy listening, y’all!

Nights on Venus - "In 4 the Evening" (2012)

The Nights on Venus debut album is currently available as a digital download (MP3) and can be found on CDBaby, iTunes, Amazon.mp3, eMusic, and other fine online retailers. The new album “In 4 the Evening” will be released by Memorial Day, 2012.

Follow Craig and Nights on Venus on Twitter (@xlntsky) and Facebook.

My Top Ten - Air Guitar Classics

Reblogged from Thoughtsfromwestfive:

A new series, something I’ve been thinking about doing for a while.  I’m hardly the first to indulge in lists, top tens or otherwise, but I think it will be fun, and maybe spark some rival choices.

Thought I’d start with something that is just pure fun: the air guitar playlist. Those songs that make you want to imagine you are there on lead guitar, or playing a very rocking riff.  

Read more… 819 more words, 9 more videos

I like this one... reblogging. Thanx.

house in progress, house in order…

Spring has come to the Rockies – about a month early and unseasonably warm and dry. Rebirth, rejuvenation, everything’s blooming – all that stuff…

North Table Mtn. in North Golden from our patio. We'll miss seeing you every day after next week...

Work on the house – a.k.a., the project that ate the month of March – continues…

The "box" over the entry way.

But we’re almost there. Move-in date is next Friday, April 6th, and the movers have been hired. What follows is kind of a visual journal of the house in progress as it has come together over the last few weeks.

The dining area... going for kind of a 'Santa Fe' feel here and in the kitchen. The cabinets had just arrived.

And the kitchen, we spend a lot of time here... the whitewashed cabinets and linoleum flooring, c. 1996, are just a distant memory. Countertops arrive early next week and the old stove will be replaced by a stainless steel one. We wanted more color and we got it. A lot more warmth now...

While Erin and I haven’t done the physical work on the remodeling and there have been a couple of delays (typical, maddening), it’s been an exciting process to watch the vision (and revisions, only a few) take shape. This has been pretty much a 50/50 collaboration from the very beginning and happily, we’ve been in agreement on how we want the space to look almost the entire time.

Fireplace wall in the living room.

Upstairs bedroom.

In dreams, when you move into a new house it signifies a shift in consciousness (it’s all consciousness) and entering into a new phase or new area of life. When you have an opportunity to not just move into a new space but re-work it completely, it’s a totally new vibe… Feels like that (and yes, we’re feng shui-ing).

And the beginnings of the front part of the Mancave Recording Studio... ♫ “Purple walls, purple walls… ♫”

A few pieces have been moved in as of Friday...

There’s still a lot to do this week getting the old place packed and cleared out, moved, unloaded, and for this coming weekend it’s going to be chaos as any move tends to be. Hopefully we will settle in quickly.

Album update: House in order

Selection and sequencing of songs for “In 4 the Evening” is now finalized and the album will go to mastering later this month or early May. The album front cover is now finalized pending approval and licensing, and is shown below.

The cover for "In 4 the Evening," the 2nd album...

Spring… Rebirth, rejuvenation, everything’s blooming, and all that stuff… Cheers!

Nights on Venus - the debut album (2011)

The Nights on Venus debut album is available as a digital download (MP3) and can be found on CDBaby, iTunes, Amazon.mp3, eMusic, and other fine online retailers. The new album “In 4 the Evening” will be released by Memorial Day, 2012.

Follow Craig and Nights on Venus on Twitter (@xlntsky) and Facebook.

Trekking in Everest Region

Reblogged from TRAVELLING SWALLOW:

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Solu-Khumbu, also known as the Everest Region, is home to the biggest mountains in Nepal and the world. This trek required acclimatization to be taken seriously, thus I had time to write. Again, these are excerpts from my journal as we journeyed through the Himalayas.

On the way to Everest Base Camp

March 7, 2011.Namche Bazaar. We flew to Lukla in a small plane from Tara Airlines, filled with other trekkers as well.

Read more… 4,788 more words

Re-blogging this as going to Nepal and Tibet has always been on my 'bucket list', but since I don't particularly like to fly, especially in small planes... well, that may not happen this lifetime. Some incredible photography from the Himalayas....

one year of blogging…. getting from here to there….

It was a year ago this week that the Nights on Venus blog made its first appearance here on WordPress. Other than a very short initial post about the NoV store being open on ReverbNation, “getting my bearings (a.k.a., ‘yes, my GPS really was useless here’)” was the first real one. Just a quick look back…

The kitchen... gone are the boring generic cabinets and floor; the walls are next - we want color!

A lot has happened since then and things now are very different – I’ve been back in Colorado for a little over 4 months – but no less transitional. The anticipated move for mid-March isn’t happening yet although more and more boxes continue to stack up around my workspace. Maxx, our cat, likes to perch on the highest box; he’s getting closer and closer to the ceiling.

That move has been pushed back to around the end of the month now as all the requisite paperwork has been completed and remodeling has begun at the new casa NoV. While it’s exciting to see the work begin – all the fixtures and cabinets have been ripped out and the work crew is starting to paint the walls – it leaves almost everything else in a state of flux where Erin and I are living now (though we’re not at the plastic utensil stage yet).

We’ve been given a drop dead date of April 1st, but right now “the waiting is the hardest part,” to quote Tom Petty… getting from here to there. The new place is only 15 minutes from where we live now and we’re only 2-3 weeks out from the move so we’re close, but right now that feels like forever. Given that I’ve been in a state of flux since early 2009, I should be used to this. Having helped a friend move into his new place the other day, it only makes me want to get this move done faster.

Likewise, the new album, “In 4 the Evening,” is all but finished but it’s that last little bit… getting from here to there. So close I can taste it. And of course when you’re that close, you want to keep moving, ‘get ‘er done’. Delays are vexing when you’re trying to make a drop dead completion date, even if it’s a self-imposed one. You don’t want to lose momentum on the project.

Sifting through the material this week, a new song has been added – “Incense” (no peppermints) – and possibly another shorter song – “Agave Dusk.” The album may have 11 songs on it, and possibly 12. Although the remodeling on the house will be done a little sooner than the final pre-mastering mixdown on the album, it seems they’re both at about the same stage. It’s all those final details…

This week the temperatures here in the Front Range are reaching the 70s and spring is just around the corner. We’ll probably have at least a couple more snowstorms in the next month, but when the weather is like this now, I start thinking about the hiking season ahead. I’m looking forward to it this year as always.

And it’s a good analogy and reminder for where I am now – it’s all journey and process. The top of the high mountain pass or peak may be your destination, but 3-5 miles in, it’s only half the hike – the other half of it is the hike back (fortunately, most of that is downhill). Hiking in the high country you know to get an early start and expect the unexpected – in the early afternoon, the clouds usually roll in and you’re probably going to get some ‘weather.’ Most of the time, that weather occurs on the hike back in the afternoon. I’ve been caught in a couple of blizzards on ’14ers’ (even in July), a few hailstorms, lightning storms, and more than a few downpours. Those are the delays and the unexpected on the trail and you can’t get impatient.

The work on the house and the album is far less dramatic or risky of course, and we’re not doing the bulk of the remodeling work, but not getting impatient applies here as well (and now Mercury has gone retrograde to boot). The trailhead – the beginning and the end – is in sight and we’re in the homestretch now. A few photos from various hikes are included below…

Trail leading to the top of Mt. Flora on the Continental Divide.

View southeast from the top of Mt. Flora.

Mt. Eva, Parry and Bancroft Peaks from the top of Mt. Flora (13,132').

Torreys Peak from the Watrous Trail near the Continental Divide.

On the Uneva Pass Trail, late afternoon.

Lost Lake, Uneva Pass Trail.

The start of the Mt. Bierstadt trail at Guanella Pass, looking north back toward Georgetown.

From the top of Eccles Pass near Dillon.

Mt. Flora and Breckinridge Peak from the Democrat Mtn. Trail south of Empire.

On the trail toward Vasquez Peak, west of Berthoud Pass.

Engelmann Peak, from the Continental Divide Trail.

As for blogging and the seemingly never-ending search for subject matter, maybe after the new album is released (by Memorial Day) and I take a couple of [needed] months off, I’ll turn this into a hiking/photography blog for a while. Yeah, that sounds good.

Nights on Venus - the debut album (2011)

The Nights on Venus debut album is available as a digital download (MP3) and can be found on CDBaby, iTunes, Amazon.mp3, eMusic, and other fine online retailers.

Follow Craig and Nights on Venus on Twitter (@xlntsky) and Facebook.

Japan One Year After The Earthquake

Reblogged from Japan and Korea: Life, Language and Religion:

My daughter made this in Japanese preschool last week as the calendar for March. Most years March would be represented by Girls’ Day but March 11th marks the one year anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake. My daughter wrote the word 頑張ろう ganbarō at the bottom. This is the volitional form of the verb ganbaru which is a word you often hear in Japanese language meaning things like “hang in there”, to endure or something you say when you wish someone good luck (since they’re going through a hard time).

Read more… 428 more words

Re-blogged on Nights on Venus... remembering the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 that hit northern Japan, one year later.

new song: “niteglo”….

Nights on Venus closes out the month of February with two new finished songs, one of which I’ve posted here. “Niteglo” is the latest installment from NoV’s forthcoming album, “In 4 the Evening” which I’m now scheduling to release by late May. Aside from possibly a few re-takes of some passages, recording of songs is now complete for the album leaving selection, sequencing, and pre-mastering prep to do.

Photograph by Noel Kerns.

And that’s a good thing. February has been a busy month here and the next few weeks are about to get a lot busier. The beginning stages of packing boxes has begun as Erin and I close on the new house tomorrow and prepare for the move in mid-March. It is a much bigger place than we’re in now only 15 minutes away and it also means larger studio digs for Nights on Venus and various other projects with a better, more comfortable listening room. More space (!), and preferably, we’ll be there for a long, long time (a few years at least).

It’s also a good thing because in the course of writing and recording songs over a period of months (8 to be exact), the work changes somewhat. Sometimes quite a bit. A lot of the sketches for the new material I’ve been writing this month clearly didn’t fit in with the rest of the album; I seemed to already be moving beyond the feel and mood of the current one into future work. Sometimes it’s hard not to get ahead of yourself when the work is going well and growing into new territory, so this seems to be a natural stopping point to wrap things up on “In 4 the Evening” (I4tE).

The new song, “Niteglo,” itself came from a song sketch I worked on during last year’s sessions but hadn’t fully developed then as I was in the finishing stages of the first album. The title comes from a natural phenomena called “earthglow” that happens in the uppermost regions of the atmosphere at night and is a little like the better-known aurora borealis but not as dramatic and occurs constantly (more space!).

“Niteglo” finds a much more welcoming home now on ‘I4tE’ in keeping with the more mysterious, haunting (and yet, upbeat and hopefully magical) mood I’m shooting for. So much of playing music is really about listening to what you’re doing, not unlike working in a visual art form and stepping back to see the work as it’s taking shape. The same applies to albums… what fits, what doesn’t, what’s needed, with what you’re trying to achieve (a great album!), which is one of the roles of a producer (yes, I am trying to “drum” up business here – hire me while I’m relatively cheap).

NITEGLO
© 2012 Nights on Venus/Craig C. Thomas. All rights reserved.)

The fade-out at the end actually leads into the next song, “Something Remembered Before Sleep,” which will be the closing track on the album. “Niteglo” will probably be the last song posted between now and when “I4tE” comes out. It’s an interesting process, posting songs to sites like ReverbNation and SoundCloud – as an artist you want to post new work so listeners get a sense of what you’re doing, what you’re about, and become familiar with your music (and, putting on my marketeer hat for a second, the NoV ‘brand’) and as a result listeners get to hear the album in progress as it’s ‘being built.’

Until next time, when serious packing will undoubtedly be in full swing here…

Nights on Venus - the debut album (2011)

The Nights on Venus debut album is available as a digital download (MP3) and can be found on CDBaby, iTunes, Amazon.mp3, eMusic, and other fine online retailers.

Follow Craig and Nights on Venus on Twitter (@xlntsky) and Facebook.