Well, it’s done. The 2010 RPM Challenge is over, and you know what ?
I did it.
Yup, yours truly, the Procrastibator himself actually finished it. And it feels awesome! You know what else feels awesome? Yes, that too, but I’m talking in the context of the Challenge here. Two other people whom I know and consider friends and fantastic songwriters also finished. Don Sawchuk and Robbie Hancock, whom I had told about the challenge and had entered on their own did it too. Maybe that’s what helped push me towards completion when the going was rough - knowing that 2 other guys I knew and respected were doing it, and most likely going to complete it, and there was no way that I, the guy that brought up the whole thing in the first place, wasn’t going to make it as well.
In case you don’t feel like following the above link, here is the Challenge in a nutshell:
A) Record an album - 35 minutes - of material in the time period of Feb. 1 to Feb. 28. For the hardcore out there, it’s also preferable if you wrote the album in Feb. as well.
B) Send it in to RPM headquarters in New Hampshire. Must be postmarked no later then noon on March 1.
C) Raise arms in victory.
D) Catch up on sleep, and detox.
And I did it. I still can’t believe I did, but I did. I know, holy shit, eh ? It was close, very close. I was doing the final mix of the final song at 11:55 on Feb. 28, and coincidentally I dropped it off at the post office at exactly 11:55 AM the next day. I had to literally speed walk to the post office to do it, but it got done.
I almost once again fell victim to what i call the “Procrasti-Monster”. Oh, it started off great: January 25th I got one of those write-on/wipe-off calendars and planned the month out completely. I even had most of the songs already written. I know that it’s preferable to write everything in Feb. as well, but hey, it was my first Challenge, and I didn’t want to try to accomplish too much in case I accomplished nothing.
As I was saying, the entire month was planned out, I contacted some visual artists I really respect to put some album art together, and as of Feb. 1 I was ready to roll. In fact, just to make a point I started laying drum tracks down at 12:01 am on Feb 1.
My first track was a spoken word piece, inspired by a poem that The Scarborough Dude wrote and read on his podcast. In fact, it was so inspiring that I decided to scrap Plan A entirely, and go with a newly-improvised Plan B. It would be a…CONCEPT ALBUM! Yes - inspired by Scarborough Dude and the Olympics I decided to have a theme of Canada…with a couple of songs about cats just to round things out. That would be awesome! I was a musical GENIUS! I began planning the new album immediately…..
….then something happened: I got a writer’s block. Here I was with the greatest idea for a concept album since Pink Floyd’s The Wall (okay, not really, but at the time it seemed like it) and I couldn’t get things to flow the way I wanted them to.
Some people know how to deal with writer’s block. I’ve tried dozens of methods over the year, and I’ll let ya’ll in on a few of them someday, but this time, maybe because I had an actual physical deadline nothing was working. So I did the most logical thing….
…I froze. Up. completely. I neither wrote nor recorded anything for almost 2 straight weeks. I watched a little Olympic coverage, some American Idol (yes, I was that desperate) and puttered around the house.
With a little less then 2 weeks to go, a plan started to emerge from the fog. It was an idea for another concept album, one that would free me from the constraints of having to do picture-perfect recordings, would allow me to write it in February after all, and one that I could actually pull off!
I’ll get into more detail about the album in my next post, but suffice it to say that I’ve got a lot of people to thank for getting done what I needed done, whether it be collaborative work, ideas, voices, etc. I’ll mention them here, but I go into greater detail in the liner notes, and will also go into more detail on my post regarding the album itself. In no special order, I’d like to thank The Luverly Michelle(tm), Mark and Natalie Shantz, The Scarborough Dude, Paul, Tanja and Mackenzie McCallum, Dr. Ignatio Castillo, Robbie Hancock, Don Sawchuk, and Mike the guitar tech from Sherwood Music. If it wasn’t for the above people, well, the album might have got done, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as cool as it turned out.
Perhaps most of all, however, I’d like to thank the people behind the RPM Challenge. What they do over there is pure brilliance. As they like to say “it doesn’t have to be the album, it just has to be an album”. While I’m not sure anyone who participated in the Challenge thinks that their Challenge album is the best thing they’ve ever produced, it’s a good way to force people to write and record. As Robbie said at one point it got him “motivated to record some songs that should have been recorded years ago”. Amen brother. The Challenge got me thinking, writing and recording. It’s a known fact that the more you do something, the better you get at it. The RPM Challenge got me to write an album that would never have existed otherwise. I guess the reason that I dig the Challenge so much is because it also does what I tried to get people to do with the Monthly Sieve Song Challenge. Anytime somebody creates a song that never existed before, the world is a better place. Unless it’s Nickelback, but face it, they’ve been creating the same song over and over for years anyways.
To celebrate the victory that Robbie, Don and I had just achieved, I invited them over to my place on March 1 for a “Listening Party” so we could hear what each other had done, and open the bottle of champagne that I had purchased for the occasion. Listening to what Don and Robbie did reminded me again that they are both great songwriters, and it was a pleasure to be able to hear new stuff from both of them. As I expected, after hearing what both of them had done, mine was a complete left-turn.
Speaking of how my album turned out, I have to say that although I’m thrilled to death with it, I’m also not totally happy with the final product. See, when you have a deadline that’s zooming at you like a runaway Toyota you tend to have to say “that’s good enough” a lot . There are a lot of mistakes on the album, a lot of production tweaks that need to be made, little touch ups here and there to be done, and to be totally honest two more tracks to be recorded that I didn’t have the time to do.
So, I’m going to spend the next couple of months lovingly tuning and honing each track until it’s as polished as it needs to be for me to be happy with it, and then maybe I’ll throw it up on iTunes and put out the CD for sale. Who knows?
This Challenge has given me lots of ideas, most of which are still sitting there, waiting to be snatched up and placed with care into their own cradles of song, and I’ve learned a lot more about the recording, editing and mixing process. And, it’s given me something I never had before: and actual ALBUM.
As a matter of fact, it’s given lots of people albums, and even more then that, it’s helped midwife into existence a ton of music that never even existed before February 1, 2010.
And that can only be a good thing.
Peace, Love, and Guiness,
Stevie Z
