Being Angry With The Fools

Today has been neatly divided between walking, recording and being angry with the fools.

The walk was nice, though a bit like inhaling a soup of pollen. I won't know until tomorrow whether my coughs and sneezes are Covid or hay fever: I'm going to test before I leave for Leicester. It is so very beautiful out there, and there seem to be even more birds than before. They seem to carry a bubble of silence with them even when they are singing. In the overall sound mix of the world, their vocals are turned up high.

The walk was a reward for doing hefty slab of marking. Oh students, students! I remember when I was an undergraduate, so sure that I didn't need the advice of the fuddy-duddy lecturers, even the ones who weren't fuddy-duddies. I thought they made things up just to make things difficult for me. Time and time again, I think of the five-year-olds convinced that the adults telling them to be careful of traffic simply don't understand that they will simply run away from a car as fast as they can (which is very fast, according to their little brains). How silly those adults are! Or when McMum told me all those complicated things about radio broadcasting and sound waves, and I simply knew the radio was full of tiny people. Silly lady, with her made-up ideas!

That's enough of that. 

So: recording.

Yesterday's vocals sound good, and I was convinced that I could tackle the Difficult Song today, but alas my wheezy cough takes me down in a rugby tackle every time I try. The melody line is pitched right up there in The Gods swinging from the curtains, and I need more headroom than I've got today, so I can land on the notes from above rather than swooping up from below. In time, in time. It's worth waiting until I'm in good voice, or perhaps not so self-conscious even of my critical self. The whole idea of DIY recording has been to avoid the anxiety of too many ears and too many opinions, but even my own two ears and one opinion seem overpowering at times.

I've done some replacement vocals for a song that didn't sound right (dull backing vocals) with an idea that it will have double bass on it, and I've also made a template for another song that I found on my phone, and played around with backing vocals for that too, but I need to re-record the guitar part for that next week. My hands are used to playing the guitar I'll be playing in Leicester, and I don't want to disrupt the muscle memory that I have spent all week drilling into my fingers (different neck widths and fret spacings, you see). Next week I'll be reverting to the guitar I'm recording with, in time for Friday's gig with Daniel Takes a Train.

Of course, much of today and last night has been reserved for Being Angry With The Fools. They are simply too narcissistic to let go of their limpet hold on power, and they don't realise that the longer they wait, the further they will fall. It doesn't matter how many cashmere hoodies their wife buys them, or how many times they get away with priapic behaviour; their places in the history books are already smudged with corruption, and no amount of money and sycophantic colleagues can buy them out of that.