Hey, y’all. Checking in with updates on a few things…
King Of Drums is now on Spotify and Apple Music/iTunes and pretty much anywhere music is streamed. Now you can listen in your car and whatnot, I guess. Enjoy!
Thanks for all the support on Bandcamp Friday. Nice response to The Last Dig and a bunch of y’all scooped up the OG version of Vertex. Good lookin’ on that. Means a lot/helps a lot.
My baseball season is over. After the mega-pressure of the nationals, I found that I was playing very relaxed in the playoffs for my regular league back home. But I wasn’t able to ride that train for very long though. My team was knocked out in the first round. It’s a bummer to lose but on a personal level, I felt pretty good because to finish the season, I was hitting the ball harder than I did all year. I finished off the final game on the mound and struck out the last batter I faced. But you know what? I’m still riding on the glory of how well the nationals went and I know that I will for a long time. I found out the other day that we’re getting rings! I’ll show you mine when I get it.
Now I’m faced with a difficult decision: do I retire? I’ve pretty much made up my mind to do so but it’s hard to walk away from the game that has given my life so much purpose and meaning. And I’m going to have to have what could be a difficult conversation with my manager. I think my decision is going to take him by surprise.
Since the season ended, I’ve been busy with music stuff. King Of Drums brought a lot of interesting people out of the woodwork, looking to collaborate. So you may see me pop up on other people’s records in the coming months. It’s been interesting. I’ve been rapping my ass off. Been making beats too. Speaking of: I made the beat and did the cuts for this song by Wordburglar (in case you missed it):
It’s fun working with new people and old friends. But at some point, I may have to shut the machine down so I can begin meditating on another album. Working on music is what’s going to get me through another Canadian winter. In the back of my mind, I’m giving myself two years make the next one. Could happen faster than that. But King Of Drums taught me that it pays to take things slow. The meditation phase takes up the longest chunk of time. And it’s always possible no vision will appear.
Here’s a thing: back in June I played a show in Halifax (my old stomping grounds). I had it in my mind that it would be the last show I’d ever play and so I wanted to play all of my personal favorites. One such favorite is the ‘Untitled’ from Man Overboard. Sixtoo made the beat for that song and back when he did, I never thought to ask him to bounce an instrumental for me. Eventually, the files for that beat were lost. That’s why whenever I performed that song live through the years, I always used another beat or did it acapella. But for the Halifax show, I really wanted to rock it in its original form. So I re-created the beat myself. I beefed it up and expanded on it a bit. Then I laid down a quick scratch vocal so that I could listen to it a bunch of times in preparation for the show. I think it turned out pretty cool. Check it out here, if you’re interested…
When did I start up this Substack thing? April? Whenever it was, I’ve been putting up a post per week since then; sometimes two. I’m thinking that at this point, I’ll scale it back to once every two weeks. I don’t want to overwhelm y’all. One thing we haven’t really talked about yet is touring. Lots of stories there. Lots to talk about. So we’ll get into that a bit in the next post. And after that, I’m thinking I’ll start doing breakdowns on individual songs. Off the top of my head, I can think of good stories for “Kiss My Ass”, “Baron Karza”, “Sebutone Def”, “The Centaur”, “Sleep Apnea”, “Secret Splendor”, “Pants On Fire”, “Stella”, “Exes”, “Blood Of A Young Wolf”, “Drawing Curtains”, “Whispers Of The Waves” and “No Idea How”.
Until the next…