A New Record...

For you RSS folks, this post will appear here as well as over at toddwrightband. That's the site where I typically journal about my music specifically. Please forgive the double-posting. (I hope to do more writing over a the toddwright site in the very near future!)

Over the past few months, a few folks have asked me about recording a new record. No large outcry by any means, but rest assured I have been thinking a lot about a new album how to go about it. Here are some of my thoughts about the process.

SONGS: Plain and simple...I just don't have enough songs for a new record. I've got four or five that I feel pretty confident about, but the rest of them are either unfinished or just don't measure up yet. I also had been working under the assumption that when I went back to track a new record I would do as many "new" songs as possible. In this case, I'm using "new" to describe songs that I have yet to use congregationally. While this is great for creativity and excitement and even marketing, the plain truth is that worship songs need to be sung. I need to get these songs in front of people...to adjust them and arrange them...heck, even rewrite them if need be! Of course, since teaching new songs to a congregation is already a tricky process, it might take me awhile to unveil these tunes and see how they go over.

CULTURE CREATION: I have this dream of doing something way different with the next record. I think we can all agree that music is going through some significant changes these days. Online distribution, pay-what-you-want and DIY attitude are creating both opportunities and obstacles for new music creation. I'd love to this next record as a non-record. In fact, I have this dream of dedicating my time to tracking tunes under-the-radar and then unveiling them in some sort of subscription system - this would essentially be taking a "TV" approach to music creation. I create a larger body of work and then ask folks to invest in some way (payment, sign-up, referalls, etc.) in an effort to receive these songs in some sort of subscription format. The challenges here are numerous. Trying to track a large body of work like this would probably require a song-by-song recording process which would be difficult to pull off in a given studio. Grassroots marketing is a fickle field at best, and I'm not quite sure I could garner the sort of "tribe" following needed to create some sort of sub-culture allure.

There's a chance I could utlize my SongDiscovery community blog to maintain a song catalog, but I'd also have to find another way to make songs available for non-SD folks.

MONEY: Raising money for a record doesn't concern me all that much. I feel pretty confident that I could raise enough funding for a record...I'm just not sure that I want to right now. Fundraising takes time and energy, and I barely enough of those two for everyday life!

For those of you who pray for my ministry, pray that I'll be wise and creative and a good steward of God's gifts. If you've got ideas (no matter how crazy) on how the next record can do something different in it's approach or application, feel free to share in the comment box!