Expectations

It's pretty much our last full day in Tucson.
Right now I'm sitting without a shirt (pants on, regrettably), my hair in a mess, on some couch, hearing the dog that I could never come to friendly terms with scratch at the door. And the cat has her head stuck in my cup of chocolate milk....

To say that I'm grateful for the time that I've had here would just be another understatement that I've been throwing out since I've arrived. I could never regret the time and the money and the energy that I've put into being here with two of my closest friends. I love that I've been here, to work with these guys for the common goal of creating music, to get fed up with each other over ideologies about how a certain part in the song should go, to apologize when my idea turns out to be the worse one. To try over and over and over again a certain guitar take until you get it just right, and your fingers feel like they might start bleeding. I've been given a taste of what I could be doing with the rest of my life, and I am in love with the situation.

All this to say, recording an Ep definitely isn't all rainbows and sunshine. Whenever I thought of recording an Ep, I always had in mind waking up in some comfortable bed, strolling over to the studio to get a cup of coffee on the way, arrive at some skyscraper building and say hello to some receptionist or something, who then assures me that "the producer is waiting for me in the studio with the hard wood floors." I would arrive in the studio to find everything already set up, the instruments tuned, so that all I had to do was walk up to a microphone and sing some perfect melody, and the rest would just work itself out.

So I wasn't really that naive, but you get the general idea.

In reality, at least for penniless musicians like ourselves, it goes something like this: "Wake up on the studio floor with your head on a pillow made of blankets to find the cat eating your face. On occasion, the producer Himself will turn on music for us and dance around with his signature Booty Dance. Find out that the gas is running low, so we must take quick showers. Begin the music making process, only to find that someone else is in the house napping, so we can't track drums at this certain hour of the day. (The studio is in a two bedroom house, consisting of the habitants of the Producer and his wife and myself and Ben). On occasion, Ben and I are to clean the bathroom and wash dishes. (Don't get me wrong. We're staying at this place for free, so it's the least we could do. But... I mean, cleaning the bathroom? haha.)

All this to say, this all turned out much different than I had expected. But I honestly do think that it's better this way. I'll always look back on these moments with the lingering thought of "that was crazy."

I leave tomorrow, and college will soon start afterwards.