Day 22: Final week begins

It's Monday again, and I sense a theme: after taking a couple days off, I feel simultaneously refreshed and totally unsure. I suppose that's a good place to start from, since I usually find myself somewhere unexpected. At this point in the project, though, I think I've become a bit too "self aware", and I don't know that I can turn that off and just create.

Today, I picked up where I left off on Friday, with the "water" track that takes me back to the American River in Sacramento, circa 1985.

I had a couple ideas about where to go with this, including really ratcheting up the tension and driving it home from there. But this ended up taking the piece in a direction that didn't feel right. I even asked myself "Is this track trying to be something it isn't?" By that, I mean that it seemed a bit on the "dance" side of things, and was losing its fluidity.

After abandoning this, I took it in the opposite direction, really breaking things down to just a few elements, and then slowly building back while bringing the vocal sounds from earlier in the album back into the mix. What do you think?

Also, for those of you who'd like to hear the whole album (still in progress) in the proposed running order, here's the playlist. Enjoy!

<<Day 20: What's in a name? Day 23: Where the river ends>>