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Day Two Hundred Nineteen (Year Four)

I gave myself a night off from the project that had occupied the last 27 days.  On one hand, I was excited to dive into the work of figuring out what finished versions of these songs are going to sound like, but on the other, I knew that what was probably best for the health of the project was a night away from it.  I'm definitely diving back in tomorrow sometime, but for now I was excited to step away and:

1) Start in on reading the Big Star biography I picked up earlier in the year.
2) Finally get around to doing some listening.

3) Go digging for (and successfully find) the book of tablature paper I had been looking for, so that I can actually hand write some of the trickier spots in the 100 Riffs video, and get back to work on those now that February is over and work on other stuff can start to even out with progress on the record.

One of my co-workers burned me some music by Peter Himmelman and Willy Porter, and brought that along with him to work today, so I'll have that to check out this weekend, along with the rest of the Volcano Choir stuff.

I've been trying to get back to some more regular listening the last couple of days.  I find that, when I'm in the middle of trying to write a lot of my own music, I need to back off of the listening a bit, for fear that it will bleed over into my writing too much.  And yet, even as I do this, I miss it a lot.  My year of "put up or shut up" needs to also be about finding more musical balance.  I'm trying to do better with it, and a lot of the time it works well, but that has been less true the last couple of weeks here.

I'm really looking forward to the turning of the calendar to March, if only because it will get me back to a sense of normalcy, with a lot of things to work on, and an urgency to push ahead.
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