So I was becoming stupider by the minute as I laid in bed and watched VH1 when my mom comes in and hands me a photograph.
“Do you remember this!” she said somewhat cheerfully.
I really wished I could forget it. It was my team photo of the junior hockey team I played for four years ago. The thing was I sucked at hockey. My mom knew this, but she thought I had fun playing hockey. Well it is hard to have fun at something you suck at. I scored only goal that season and it was during the pre-season.
At that moment I realized how much I hated being a failure. Then I realized what I was doing at the moment. Then I got up and started the school work I was supposed to be doing.
So what was the last moment of inspiration you had?
I get musical inspiration. Not as often these days as I used to, because I have no one to play with, so I do multitrack demos on the computer when the mood strikes me.
Last spring, I got the Adobe Loopology CD that has hundreds of samples of real players playing real instruments. All kinds of licks, chops and rhythms that you can put together at will. This was the best source of drums I had yet to come across that wasn’t an actual person. So I began to explore the drum kits, and put together a rhythm track. This suggested a song to me, so I composed it on the fly, and put on the guitars and bass. After much fixing and editing and many listens, to get a feel for what it really ought to sound like, I scrapped the first version and rebuilt it and played the parts again. The more I played it, the more inspired I was. Over the space of a couple of days I came up with one of the best songs I’ve written in years.
The only trouble is, I can’t spend unlimited time recording, because there’s all this other stuff to do like work, sleep, talk to my wife and things like that. If I ever get a vacation, you know what I’m going to spend it doing.