Cold Feet. Like, Freezing.

The process of recording this album has been eerily smooth. Adam & I worked extremely well together in the pre-production, tracking & mixing stages, we were all efficient & prepared in the studio and we stayed within budget. Sure, we had our moments - Rebecca (who plays cello throughout the album) & I showed up at the wrong address for our Berkeley tracking session, and sat outside for an hour before realizing our mistake. Yeah there was that time I made Adam re-track an entire song's worth of vocals, only to then say "eh, I like the original better." And its possible that I may or may not have been approximately 30 minutes late to every session... but I'm just saying - overall it was an extremely smooth & easy process. So when I booked our mastering session a few weeks ago, I assumed the smooth process would continue :).

Then all of the sudden, Tuesday of this past week I realized the finality of mixing. This is IT. There's no going back now. After we master, I can't change ANYTHING - can't tweak the mixes, can't change the order, can't fix any mistakes. And holy crap, after this - the title is set, which dictates the cover artwork & the entire body of work that is this record. But what if I wake up next week and its ALL WRONG??? What if I hate everything? What if...

Which is essentially where my head was for the past 3 days. Ask anyone who spent time with me in the past 72 hours and they will tell you - I was losing my mind. I couldn't sleep, couldn't articulate a simple sentence, couldn't focus, let alone make any last minute decisions!?! I send Adam maybe 347 emails in the 24 hours before the mastering session, asking him to make all kinds of teeny changes (only to retain like 2 of them). I started second-guessing the title of the album, the overall graphic design, hell - I started to second guess my own name. Ridiculous. Finally Adam sent me an email that helped bring me back to reality:

Here's my little post-mixing-when-you're-unsure check list:

1. If you put off the mastering, you'll just keep making changes, which may or may not be better changes. 

2. The changes you've made thus far are fine but won't effect the course of human history. 

3. In 2 months, you'll feel differently about all the mixes.

Having said all that, you have to be happy with the final mixes at this point in time so whatever you need, I'll do.

So I took a deep breath, had faith in the music I spent the last 6 months perfecting & got through it. More on the actual mastering session next post...