Tough day, though I had almost the whole afternoon to make up my mind what today’s song should sound like. I threw away a different concept after wasting two hours tinkering. Especially the lyrics would escape me. My late afternoon walk offered me a great view of the mountains and I tried to caputure that moment in words, failing. “Ladder to the Moon” is the emergency song, though after listening to it for a few times during mixing, I’d say: it’s different, but fine.

5:30 p.m. - watched darkness fall after a very beautiful winter day, mountains in the distance, near but still far, majestic sight. Tinkered with some lyric elements while sitting on a bench, enjoying the view.

6:30 p.m. - Put down some foundation recordings for the mountin song idea. Chord progressions went fine. Lyrics still missing.

9:00 p.m. - Recording starts on song five.

10:00 p.m. - Recording stops on song five. Shoot, lyrics crap, song crap. Searched for some inspirations, came up with the great guitar sound, immediate inspiration. Drum track, bass, click-track guitar and vocals within minutes. Started recording the vocals. Stopped several times. The structure and free-floating guitar made it impossible to sing to it and find my way around the chord schema.

10:45 p.m. - Live recording the whole song. Almost good. One the last “building a ladder” came out “buying a ladder”. Might work as well, just not as romantic. Threw in some standard mastering plugins. Done

11:00 p.m. - Mixing. Throwing Bass and Drums out. Bouncing. Oops, another mixdown after one config mistake.

11:30 p.m. - Done. Whew, this one was messy.

Learnings of the day:

Fail faster, you might not get lucky with a quick alternative song that quickly.
Try to structure your lyrics better from the beginning. Maybe my mistake was listening to Taylor Swift too much today, last year’s “Folklore” was on constant repet. She makes everything look easy.