Arranging, Deranging

Went over to Wayne's house yesterday even though I was exhausted from another sleepless night. We basically finished The Goddess of War. It's about 5 minutes long, which is OK but I wonder about the complexity. As with the first album, it's hard sometimes for me to hear the electronic arrangements and trust that the acoustic versions will be cool. In fact, I joked with Wayne as I came into the studio--he was arranging a tune for one of his next albums. "Is that violins?" I asked. "No, saxophones," he replied. I asked if having the synthesized sounds didn't bother him. He said buying better samples is just a question of spending money where it isn't needed--he can hear what he needs to, so why spend on more realistic horns or voices? Bass, trombone, piano and drumset sound pretty realistic, it's just some of the higher timbre stuff that is hard to differentiate.

I edited my lyrics down, and we have a cool bridge now. I'd like to let a day go by before I listen to it again. Last night it was looping in my brain, driving me nuts. The next step for me is to put this on my hard disk recorder and lay down the lead vocal and some backing vocals.

Wayne also gave me copies of Ain't No Sunshine as he's arranged it thus far (it's really cool as a salsa tune) and a song I wrote, Her Ways Wander.

Plus, he wants me to sing Afro Blue and Use Me on his next album, so we listened to those arrangements. He's really been cooking, and they sound great (fake horns and all). Hopefully this next week I'll finally get some down time, now that I've cleaned out my cubicle and the holidays are blessedly over. Unfortunately, the mess from work has been transferred to my home office, where boxes are piled everywhere.

In last night's dream, everyone else from my old magazine was laid off, and I was consoling them. I apparently now lived under the building and I came out to see them filing out to get their hands stamped. The managing editor was railing about how she wanted more than just a hand stamp, and the art director was weeping. His partner was telling me that they'd just paid $179 to adopt a child and then this happened. I woke up and after about half an hour I realized that they hadn't been laid off, only Laurie and I had. Ah well. At least I slept most of the night.