A Starting Point

Today is June 10th, 2024 and at this point I’ve realized tremendous success having met my one of my life-long goals: sharing my music with others. Success? Yes, tremendous success. I define the measures of my successes and failures, not others. My goal with the ‘Pudding Jackson’ project has been to get the sounds and stories within my mind and soul out into the world and, well, mission accomplished.

Parts of these first two tracks have been floating around for more than a few years. I’d start to write them and then some distraction would pop up and they would go into a collection of musical doodles. If you know have a friend or loved-one that is a crafter… particularly a crafter with a “craft room” you know what I am describing… remnants of fabric or patterned paper or collage materials everywhere. The crafter knows where s/he’s set the real jewels within their workshops, but to the common eye it just looks like your typical hoarder’s environment. That’s been my creative life as a musician… lot’s of projects started but nothing to show for it.

The process of pulling out these musical ideas again and arranging them into larger musical pieces was liberating, but also frustrating… lyrics that sounded good once upon a time… now sounded dated or irrelevant. “Polaroid skeletons are disposed of easily” became “Digital skeletons aren’t disposed of easily”… and. I’ve yet to decide what I will do with “The phone feels cold against my ear, but roadside calls let me hear your voice…”. I mean, has the average listener ever used a roadside pay phone? With time everyone’s frame of reference changes and so will my music.

The other day I was connecting with my keyboard player, Stefan, about a yet to be released track called ‘Son’. This song channels everything good about the MTV-era rock, but I asked him what we could do to make it sound more modern. He shared that it was a lost cause and that I should simply embrace it. I pushed a bit more and he shared that we could replace Chris’ drums with a digital drum track. That was a non-starter and so the song will not be on the bleeding edge of today’s music, but it will still rock your socks off (‘Son’ is scheduled for an August release date).

I’ve gone off track and need to bring this blog post back around to my point; Pudding Jackson & the Meantone Coalition is a starting point from which I can leverage a life-time of musical doodles to create great new music. It’s a success, because I set a goal of publishing my music and getting out of my head and to your ears. I hope you like the tracks… I really do, but that’s not how I’m defining the success of this project. For me we’ve already achieved tremendous success! #winning #PuddingJackson #PuddingJackson&theMeantoneCoalition #musicblog #newmusic