More work on Welcome to my Gallery yesterday. The album is nearly complete, and is a little different than my music before. As will much of my music of the last 4 years, I waver between broadly liking all of it and broadly disliking all of it, but, objectively, I've certainly made some new technical improvements on this album in guitar playing, singing, and production and engineering, as well as the new audio effects I've programmed. Improvement in art, for me at least, is a long and slow process of accretion of small improvements in techniques and skills. It's odd that many commercial albums of the 70s and 80s featured bands that tended to peak early. As a Queen fan their earliest albums, Queen II, Sheer Heart Attack, A Night At The Opera, are perhaps their best, and I still rate Kate Bush's The Kick Inside among her best (but Hounds Of Love and The Dreaming are certainly better). The Beatles gradually got better with each release.
Today I'm leaving for a few days 'holiday' in Bristol. I hate holidays. Holidays cause me great anxiety, sleeplessness and illness, a depressive lack of productivity or sense of doing anything useful. A few days 'holiday' will shorten my life by weeks and I never take one voluntarily, but sometimes one must acquiesce for social reasons. I didn't sleep at all last night and I'm counting down the hours until I return.
