Foot In The Door EP 

While I'm surrounded by unbearable noise I thought I'd sit and give a little update on the recording progress that's been happening.  No, no grand philosophies or insights on the intricacies of the universe or emotion tonight, just a simple update and a howdyado.

On Thursday I received a Valentine's Day gift in the form of four mastered tracks that will make up a new EP that I'll be releasing, Foot In The Door EP.  It'll be an EP of four new songs that you'll hear from the upcoming Moon King full length record.  Think of the EP as a little teaser into Moon King - and there's a catch.  It'll only be available to purchase as a 7" vinyl!  If you're not a vinyl fan, or don't have a record player, or don't like the fact that I'm only releasing it as vinyl, well, I sincerely apologize.  But there is good news, that Moon King isn't that far off and those same four Foot In The Door songs will be available soon along with the Moon King family!

The vinyl is a teaser and a little limited edition collector's memento from me to you.  Who knows, maybe it'll be a good excuse to go out and get a record player?  All your favorite bands are putting out vinyl these days, so c'mon, get with the 1890s!

The EP features the talents of my very favorite musicians: Lucas Martinez (Guitars, Live Sampling), Samuel Murphy (Drums, etc.), Jon LaTona (Upright bass, Electric Bass).

So pick up a copy!  Release is still TBA while I deal with pressing, manufacturing and all that fun stuff... Stay tuned.

PJ


Thoughts on Songwriting - Spare parts. 

People often ask me about the process that goes on when I sit myself down and write a song.  I don't really know what to explain to them, really.  There's no formula, no trick or book for beginners on the topic.  On second thought, there are a lot of all of those things out there, but stay clear from those things because all they're going to teach you to do is draw a smiley face on a white piece of paper.  It's different for everybody, however. 

For me, I go fishing.  I cast a line and let it sit.  Sometimes I'll drink a beer while my pole sits idle over the dock and I'm reclined with my hat over my eyes doing nothing but letting the air gently pass over me like a blanket made from the fabric of space.  Sometimes, depending on the mood, I'll roll up my sleeves and jump in, punching a couple of fish unconscious until I find the one that looks nice mounted on the wall, leaving the rejects adrift for the birds.  But most of the time songwriting is a gentle line sat secretly across still waters, waiting for the slightest tug to trip my interest.  In the meantime I'll do other things; I'll play cards, or wash the dishes or look up how long it takes to drive from Beijing to Paris.  Sometimes the point is not to focus so hard.  Sometimes the most interesting things you can see are the ones you're not staring at directly, and the fish never come when you're yelling at them.

Songs are strung together fragments, if you want to know the truth of it.  Little pieces of piano parts or words or rhythms you feel that you glue together like a lego tower.  Sometimes they all come together at once in the same brand-new package and you have the pleasure of following the instructions and building it all up in one sitting.  Other times you find old pieces that never quite fit, and click those together with a new piece you stole from your best friends house, and click that with the awkward piece you found in an old jacket pocket in the closet.  And suddenly the old drum rhythm that never worked for any other song fits nicely over your pretty piano melody, which happens to make a nice bed for the words that came to your head while you were driving.  And before you know it, a song is born.

That's only the creative side of the spectrum, the actors and the set on the nicely lit stage.  If you want both halves of the sphere, I'll let you all about the real grit, the technical nightmare and chaos that is orchestrated backstage, the coal shovelers who keep the whole boat afloat.

I wrote a new song, and finished a new mix.  There's an announcement to be made in the next couple of days, but I'll wait a bit longer when it's ready.  For now, enjoy the weekend.


Healing silence. 

Making records isn't all I do.  I have my hands in a lot of pies, but in the end they all seem to be filled with similar ingredients.  I spend a great deal of my life seated in front of a computer or recording console, juggling instruments, engineering sounds, mixing sounds, producing sounds.  Lots of sounds hammer at my ears and after awhile, it becomes tiresome and I need a break.  There's this thing they call 'ear fatigue' that is a very real and very annoying little thing, whether or not it's actually harmful to the anatomy of what's going on inside of your tubes is irrelevant to the fact that damaging or not, it muddies up your focus and numbs you to the clearer picture of what's going on.

Liken it to a muralist who paints a scene on the side of a building.  A great big canvas right in front of him, all the colors he needs right at his fingertips ready to tell whatever clever story happens to be buzzing around in his head.  But the one thing he needs, the most important thing of all in order to imprint his internal thoughts onto the external side of that building, is a decent amount of perspective, which unfortunately happens to be the one thing that he cannot grasp without taking any measure of a break.  So he can toil on endlessly, seeing fingers as big as his head in front of his face and whole sections of a wall the size of himself all colored the same hue without any of it measuring to any kind of sense.  Sure, he might have a delicate map in his brain or maybe a formula for proportion in which he starts out using, but in the end, the only way he can truly see if what he's got is worth a damn is by putting the brushes down, dodging the traffic in a stroll across the street to turn his head back over and examine his work standing and staring right back at him in plain daylight.

This quick refresher, this cleansing of the palette is a necessary step in anyone's life.  Whether you're an artist of some kind or a student or the guy who changes the toilet paper rolls in the airport bathrooms.  Taking a break is the only thing that lets you see that mural across the street, making sure it's all in order and exactly how you hoped it would be.  Sure, you have to put down your brushes and stop working for awhile.  This stresses many of us out sometimes, myself included.  The relentless tick of the clock clicks persistently and loudly at those of us who feel we aren't reaching our potential.  But sometimes the pause is worth double the movement.

Needless to say, here and there I take a break from toiling over what I need to be doing, completely push it aside from my life no matter how important I may feel it is.  It's right up in front of my face, too close to discern its proportions and I need to step away and forget about it for awhile in order to see its beauty and its mistakes.  You know that saying, you never find what you're looking for unless you're no longer looking for it.  Some of that applies here, too.  So here I am in a winter weekend in Los Angeles, seated across the street looking at my mural on the wall, no longer overwhelmingly in my face but from a proper distance, a heap of perspective standing before me to show me the way of my next stroke.  Ears rested and thoughts re-organized.

And for now, meet Pete, the studio mascot.


Poise through the noise. 

Part of being a creator who makes things on his or her own dime, time and two dirty hands is having limited options and resources at your disposal to see those fleeting visions in your head come to life.  In the unfortunate case of being Patrick Joseph in the infancy of 2013, this means you share a cheap, run-down studio with a handful of other bands & artists who don't exactly swim on the same wavelength. 

I sit here staring at you, my dear friend, looking back through the screen into your eyes in any hope to distract myself from my noisy neighbors right next door who somehow find a way for their intrusive rumbling to penetrate the well-insolated walls of this space.  If you want to know what 1986 probably sounded like, it's happening clumsily and excessively right next door, in a muddy cloud of delusion and intrusion into the airspace that should be my santuary of thought and creation. 

But, being a passenger on this ship, there is no sense in cursing the waves.  You learn to make the most with the circumstances you're given, and despite my need to tend to the creation of a very delicate acoustic song admist a mess of muffled Van Halen mockery, Moon King will prevail.

Here is a snapshot of the inside of my head.





A little sweet nothing. 

Remember me? I used to shoot air through your ear drums. Ah yes, me. I hope we're on the same page now.

It's been a long while since I've been active, a little too long in fact. I thought about this unfortunate rift in our relationship and decided it's about time I resurfaced, in some form or another.

Well, it hasn't been that long. It does feel like it, however. As you may know, I've been hard at work on my second full-length release, Moon King. I can't tell you how many hours, days, weeks, months have gone into pre-production, production, post-production, post-mortem-production, pre-post-re-recording-production, post-therapy-production. I'm a little bit older in the process and a lot bit crazier. Just ask my friends, they probably can't even remember me anymore.  On second thought, they're playing on the record!  And they're real people this time around - I've since fired my imaginary band members from my debut album Antiques.  Creative differences.

So, just so the time doesn't pass too depressingly away and we all forget about one another, I've decided to start this blog - an account and a look inside the thought process of the creation of Moon King. And being that I'm my own boss, maybe having you as somebody to report to will help the pressure for a release build more, and as a result, something might surface sooner than never.

So here I am, the inner echoes of the wrinkles in my head, from me to you. God help us all.

More to come soon.  With any luck, photos, video clips, lots of notes, and stress-relieving rants.