Monday, July 30, 2012

It's been such a long time . . .


I realize that it has been a very long time since I have spewed my stream of consciousness out onto this blog.  I assure you that this is not because I have been hiding from the world of music.  To the contrary, my plan to write a song every couple of weeks worked out brilliantly and I can now say that I have a rough draft of the entire new album complete.  At this time, I am putting the finishing touches on the lyrics and plan to record vocals over my silly guide vocals starting this week.  I am pretty pleased about this, especially because I nearly lost my entire studio (and house) last week. 

A week ago on Friday I was lying in bed watching TV when a bright light and loud crack made me and my wife believe that house had just exploded.  We ran out of bed, to the sounds of alarms blaring, screaming to our kids to make sure they were alright.  They were, and they came running downstairs with equal looks of shock on their face.  Then we smelled the smoke coming from the studio.  It turns out that lightning had hit two 150 foot tall pine trees 10 feet outside of our bedroom window.  The bolt traveled down the trees, through the roots, and connected with our cable TV lines.  These lines heated to the point of setting the insulation in the walls of the studio on fire.  After calling 911 and getting everyone out of the house (as well as my studio hard drives) the Fire Department arrived and tore out a wall in the studio, putting out the fire.  Thanks to their quick work, the house did not catch fire.  However, nearly every electronic device in the house was fried, with the exception of my studio.  Somehow, the lightning had destroyed nearly every surge suppressor in the house except the ones in the studio.  We lost TV’s, computers, audio equipment, phones, furnaces, and much more.  But somehow, the studio equipment and hard drives were fully intact.  Insurance will cover most of the damage, but could not have replaced the several weeks worth of work I had done recording since my last off-site backup.  Lesson learned . . backup to an external drive every day!!

On another note, Jay Rowland and I decided to take our writing in a different direction.  NOS will continue to be written and performed by me alone.  However, we are writing from scratch together for an as yet unnamed prog metal duo.  More to come about this in the near future. 

Anyway (they say she comes on a pale horse), the album seems to be structured like this:  brief intro, rockin’ 5 minute proggy song, 12-minute prog metal piece, short classical guitar interlude, 12-minute prog metal piece, 22 minute progressive rock epic, 7-minute remake of a prog favorite.  Hope that clears things up! 

More to come, sooner than last time (I hope)!

Craig

2 comments:

  1. Sounds so good that you saved your life and your Family !
    Everything else is not worth that much. Although I'm happy to hear that you saved your hard drives, too.
    I'm very excited to hear the next level of NOS.
    And also the prog work with Jay Rowland -
    can't await it.
    All the best for you, your incredible work, your family, friends and your inspiring mind.
    Thomas Nathan.

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  2. Thanks Thomas! Very true, I feel very fortunate about how things turned out.

    Take care!

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