Did much work on the album art yesterday. It was broadly inspired by the swirly and complex designs on contemporary passports. I also wanted to include some primary digital colours to evoke the old BBC Micro. There's also a minimalism to it, influenced by the cover to Jarre Live, the first L.P. I bought. First draft:
Second draft:
I weighed myself last night at 54.5kg. My weight was (at one point) 59.5, and in 2020 averaged 56.7, so this is an unusual drop, probably a result of stress on this anxious year rather than general fitness. I feel healthy, but sometimes tired or weak at those times when anxiety/life-lust subsides. I haven't really had a day off in many months so I resolved to have an easier day today.
In practise it has been very busy so far, but joyously so. I started by singing new vocals for the last two tracks on We Robot: Fake Plastic Lies, and P-L-Astic. These were good, today's singing perhaps my best to date. Spurned on by this, I sang one take of vocals for Style Guru Fashion Queen. A few months ago, when I wrote that song, the high chorus was a stretch. Now that's easy, but the low verse difficult. The song jumps more than an octave and it's quite a challenge to sing in one take. I managed it, but skipped the lines to be added in a different voice later.
I'm still learning more about production. Fake Plastic Lies benefitted enormously from sub-melodies, and is my first song with pop-brass, which gives it a happy, 1980s, Caribbean sort of feeling. This songs needs a solo. I think that's the last of the major changes. I've also investigated today (again!) how to calculate LUFS; it would be useful to add to Prometheus if I can manage it.
This afternoon I drilled the 6.5mm holes in the 12x25mm pine for the legs for the studio lights. This has proved to be quite a mammoth engineering project. Some parts failed in testing so I've re-glued them and will try to attach everything again tomorrow or later.
