Laid Low

After the year end release of “Going Home” I have not been very active publicly. There’s good, and not so good reasons for that. I felt like I should post an update for all of you.

The Bad: I’ve been struggling with health issues for the past several weeks. I’ve been going to several appointments with healthcare professionals for testing and treatment. I’ve missed work at the job that actually pays me which is expensive. That job for now is how I finance this music project, and all that goes with it. I wish and hope that this project grows over time enough to be at least self sustaining. Ideally, the dream goal is to grow it enough to make it my full time job. The health issues hurt the odds that any of that ever happens. I also decided to address a lot of technical issues involving the tools I use to make music, and doing that has been a lot more problematic than expected. It’s my ongoing mission to continue streamlining my process for music production so I can turn inspiration into productions I feel ready to share with the world. With the little time I have free from my job, and feeling sick; I want to be able to get more done with the music. It’s a big challenge. I’ve run into numerous technical issues as I work to better organize my technology, and streamline my workflow. It’s been maddening, but I am confident it will be all worth it. In addition to all that; a lot of my promotional efforts since launching this project a few years ago have been centered on Meta platforms. The primary platform I used to manage all that was my personal Facebook account which I’ve had for about 15 years. If you’ve been following you know my Facebook account was hacked and disabled in October 2023. The hacker also attacked the page I used to promote my music, and the Meta Business account I used to boost posts. It was also tied to an Instagram account that I set up as my official page there. I have been struggling to recover the account since then, and it has been a maddening journey. I haven’t given up. I’m still working on it. This hacker did a lot of damage very quickly such that the automated processes Meta/Facebook have in place to address such things do not work in my case. Unfortunately, they also offer no straight forward alternative options to address hacked and disabled accounts. I have been trying several work-arounds I’ve found on YouTube, general internet searches, and from a sub-Reddit dedicated to this topic. I continue with that, and I’m hoping my newest case initiated ultimately leads to my being successful in recovering all that was lost. Of the 5-6 cases I have been able to initiate with Meta, this newest one is the first time it appears it was actually escalated to their internal teams for investigation. With the previous cases the Meta Pro agents handling the cases claimed they could not internally escalate my case, and that there was nothing they could do for me on the matter.

The Good: Yes, let’s end here with the good stuff. I have not put much effort into promoting the year end single “Going Home” largely for all that I mentioned above, but there is another reason. I’m not revealing yet, but there is something in the works for the purpose of promoting that song. When that is ready I will put a little more effort into promoting it, and this music project overall. In the meantime I have managed to squeeze in some music production with all the crap I mentioned above. I have a brand new song, and a cover song about 65% complete. I have tinkered with starting another cover. I also have been working a bit on doing a new version of a song I wrote back in the 1990s. Working on that old song inspired me to revisit more of my old music from the 1980s & 1990s. I spent several hours yesterday recovering MIDI files of my old music from the 1990s. This includes a few MIDI projects I had started of songs originally written in the 1980s, and a couple lame attempts I made in this century to get back to making music. I also consolidated some ide fragments I started since launching this project that never got developed. I expected recovering all that MIDI to be fairly straight forward, and something I could do in an hour; maybe 2 hours. Instead I spent something like 8 hours working on all of it. I’m happy that I was able to recover it all, but damn, that was a lot of work! So, I’m now entertaining the Idea of chipping away at making new versions of most of those old songs between my other projects, and eventually releasing an album or two full of new versions of my old songs. With the songs already basically being written it really comes down to cutting new vocals, using new sounds for the already programmed MIDI, and doing some production work to flesh them out enough for release. I stayed up late last night setting up a template to make the workflow easier for that project, and I was really happy with how it was coming together. Very cool to hear all those old MIDI sequences triggering newer better sounds.

So, like last year, this year is starting slow when it comes to finishing & releasing music; but you can see some of the reasons for that above. That said, I still intend to, and believe I can release more music this year than I have in the years since starting this project. By summer I expect to be rolling stuff out on a more regular basis. I am also contemplating changing the name of this project aka my ‘artist name’. There’s good reasons for doing that which I’ll explain in more detail should I decide to move forward with a new name.

Stay tuned!