No Action

I went to bed last night listening to Elvis Costello sing his song "No Action".

I had the song in my head for hours but didn't know the name or any of the actual lyrics. So it made it hard to type anything into Google and come up with some sort of lead. The only line I could remember (and I remembered it wrong) was "I'm not a hurricane junkie" (the line is actually "I'm not a telephone junkie")

I finally found the song because I remembered Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day sang the song live with Elvis one night. That, at least, narrowed down the songs quite a bit. So, I finally found it and listened to it a bunch of times last night.

When I woke up this morning the song was still going through my head.

I've been thinking a lot about the music side of OilCan Drive lately. With the interior art almost completed on the comic book side and only a few covers and pin-ups left to do the big 800 pound gorilla in the room (no offense to Henry, my bass playing ape) is actually doing the album.

And it has me scared to death.

The majority of the album has been written and arranged. I need to write a few lyrics here and there and it will be ready to go. Then it's just a matter of demoing the whole thing, listening to it again, making changes, and then laying down each song, track by track, with guitars, bass, drums, vocals, and whatever else I can think of to put in there.

It's a huge task and it's staring down at me like a huge brick wall I need to climb up. It's daunting to say the least. I keep trying to tell myself, "one step at a time...baby steps...just do what you can today and there is always time to do more tomorrow." I think I need to take that first step and just start working on it. (it's funny, I just typed stop instead of start...hmmm....Freudian slip, anyone?)

I have the image in my head of Samwise from the Lord of the Rings as he and Frodo set out from the Shire. "If I take one more step I'll be as far away from home as I've ever been before."

That's how I feel. I'm taking a huge step into a very great and vast unknown. And I don't know if this will work at all or if anyone will care.

It's hard when you're tackling a project like this all by yourself. It's all on you. There are no "professionals" in the room to fall back on. The project lives and dies by what you do alone.

But, I won't let whatever fear I have stop me. I'll take that first baby step soon and get this tremendous ball rolling. The fear is good. Every great project that I love I've heard the artist talk about how if you're not scared then you're not doing it right.

Did I mention I'm scared, yet?

No wonder I have Elvis Costello's "No Action" running through my brain. I promise I'll get myself out of neutral soon.