clivemurray.com

Well, friends and neighbours, it’s happening. Work is once again actually progressing on material for my second album.

“Gunslinger” is being revisited in an attempt to find a melody line which doesn’t suck like a jet-powered Dyson. “The Smoke” is approaching completion of the basic lead parts. “Hyper Thalamus” has a wicked Dream-Theater-esque intro and verse pattern which give way to an almost Latin chorus piece. “Perpetual Light” is finished bar a percussion line which needs to come in after 8 bars. “Bond Of Union” has a guide guitar down and some ideas about structure in place. “Kalahari” was finished some months ago, but may get a bit of remixing before it goes on a disc.

I’ve been inspired in no small part by the awesome, possibly divine, Mattias Eklundh (and of course his band Freak Kitchen) to pick up the guitars and get on with it. I hope to have at least two of those songs finished - and another 5-7 started - by Christmas this year, looking at completion of the recordings by hopefully April ‘05 or so.

But.

The thing is, this album won’t get made unless more people buy my first one, “Earthman”. I just haven’t sold enough copies to justify it. I haven’t even sold enough for my investors to break even, which may not sound like an uncommon thing, but this is an independent group of people, not an official record company with merchandising income and advertising revenue. It’s just some people who put the money up-front to make 1000 copies of the album. And let me tell you, the number of sales needed for them to break even is really very small… and I haven’t even reached that.

This being the case, I can hardly go to them cap in hand and say “Hey guys, I wrote another album! How about we go again?” because, pretty obviously, they’ll be saying “Yeah, but we didn’t even make our money back last time.” Simple economics, innit?

I don’t have an advertising budget - I don’t even have enough money to buy new strings this month - and I don’t get my name in the magazines, so people just don’t know about my album, much less why they should buy it.

Ack. I guess I’m just bleating. Maybe an ad in one of the guitar magazines would help. I shall investigate that.

I shall go ahead and write and record the tracks for the next one anyway - I’ll probably lose my sanity if I don’t - and we’ll see what can be done with them when we come to it.