Shuffling

It's a restless time, finishing a CD. Yesterday I called Carol and asked her to do a photo- I want to do it in Rare and Vintage Guitars in Denmark Street so I'll have to call them. Carol is one of only three people who I don't mind taking pix of me- Mike Slocombe and Martin Stephenson are the others. Everybody else wants to steal my soul, I know it, and they must keep away.
Today's task is to go into the studio and finalise the master copy.
Oh, it will be a nuisance. I want to edit one song to make it shorter, remix another again and crucially, change the order of songs. I want to put one of the strange ones first. I had been listening and listening and couldn't work out what was wrong, and I realise that although the best song was first, it may well not be the best version of it that I can ever possibly manage. So I moved tracks around and re-listened and re-listened.....
So what's going first is a song that was a reject from the first CD that I have worked on to make it have a lovely atmosphere. And the track starts with a bang.

After that, I'm getting the bus to London Metropolitan University where I'm doing a talk about the book to some students. It's funny, as soon as I had finished the book it seemed as though it was someone else's and not mine, probably because I have never thought of myself as a writer but also possibly because it is a tribute to so many other people. So it feels like I'm going to talk about someone else's project and how they did it!
I've also been distance-mentoring a songwriter from the north east (hi Robson!) and his first song is nearly finished. I've just written the chords out and I'm posting them to him today; then tomorrow I pick up 108 songs written by the students at the University of the West to listen to and give written feedback.

Meanwhile, outside it's birds, birds, birds. I keep wanting to phone people and say 'Listen to the blackbird!'. They are such good tunesmiths- I've written before about how a blackbird wrote most of the solo for 'Freight Train' that I did with Helen and the Horns. Oh, you tar-feathered tunesmen and tunesladies, you are clever buggers and you make me smile, because you just can't stop and such joie-de-vivre is totally infectious.