With The Black Cat Trilogy now firmly in the rear view mirror, it feels like time for a fresh start.

I had a few projects on the back burners — Ainsworth Strange, intended to be a collaboration with another artist that fizzled (well, I let it fizzle). Enthusiasm matters. We’ll leave it at that. I also have a promising collaboration with Emily Dolan Davis (intended to be a short Catnyp EP) that consisted of drums and some bass ideas smacked down that was derailed by the move out to Portland and back to Montana. I’d also written about 20 loose little chord progression-ditties on Music Maker that had some legs. Then there were the 30 demos from the late 80s-early 90s I’d dumped into the computer with an eye on revisiting the “germs” (ahem) of my past. Some were surprisingly good. Others … less so.

So the choice was, rack up two or three projects and either work on them in parallel, or smash one at a time. Or was it? Frankly, time is limited and focus is everything.

So: all of the above are in the hopper for Catnyp IIII. It will be a full length album, 10-16 tracks. It’ll be more pop-rock, it will be less layered, it will have a bit more of the old quirky-joy-tongue-in-cheek of those 80s-90s demos. Tones will be simpler but carefully crafted. I’m taking a course just on using EQ to help my mixes.

Oh yeah — I’m playing drums on the tracks Emily isn’t. I started in late September. Good news: My timing is not bad and I play to a click with ease (that’s the bass player in me). Bad news: I am very slow and grind the gears when I change things up. But, that’s just practicing and time. Keep it 2/3 or 4/4 and I can just about do it (with a little quantizing, of course). There’s something pretty cool about playing bass and guitar to your own drumming – talk about knowing how to lock in to the minutiae.

Other changes: Rickenbackers are going into their cases. This’ll be jazz bass, Jaguar, Telecaster and maybe Gretsch territory unless circumstances demand otherwise.

Three songs are well on their way and there is a confidence and comfort to be gleaned when a little snippet of an idea on Music Memo just turns effortlessly into a pure pop song with all the right parts in all the right places.

Principles at play here – work fast. Keep it simple. Make every tone work. Write from the heart, write fast, don’t second guess. Act like studio time is the most precious resource on the planet. Because, really, it is. This is what it is about.