Hi everyone, 

How did it get to be almost April already? I owe you all a real update after sending over my small novella of a blog post back in January. I'm actually kinda pissed at myself that it's taken me this long to send another email, but so it goes, I guess. Sigh. My goal is an email every 2 weeks, so let's see if I can hold myself to that going forward. I've historically been super bad at anything other than wrestling with music privately at home or in the rehearsal or recording studio and I'd like to fix that. 

ANYWAY, I don't have any big update to share at the moment, but I do have a new track with a fun story. 

Just gimme the music: The track is called, "Make Myself", and you can hear it here: https://soundcloud.com/kidbearband/make-myself 

Tell me the story: Last summer, I was having a tough week. I'll spare you all the details, but I was unsure what to do about my job and we were in the thick of it with a 6-month old and 3-year old. So, I was tired and confused and feeling like I'd never have time to make music again at the level I've always wanted to do it (I'm naturally a bit dramatic anyway and sleep deprivation and the demands of little kids don't help.) 

Fortunately for me, I married a wonderful woman who has come to accept that, if I don't get some music time, at some point my brain just breaks. I wish this weren't so and I actually spent several years trying to kill of this side of my personality, but it doesn't work. There is just a point where, if I haven't done enough music, I pretty much can't function. And I'd definitely reached that point last June. 

So, Laura told me to go make music that night. But I didn't want to just fiddle around with some songs or practice licks or whatever. I felt like I wanted to do something dramatic, something big, something that would not allow me to think me about anything than music for a few hours. I called David (drummer, harmony singer, and keyboard player extraordinaire) and shared my idea: Our mission for the night was to write, record, mix, and release a whole song in one evening. Chords, riffs, melodies, lyrics, arrangement...the whole 9 yards. I had 30 seconds of a guitar riff I'd written that afternoon while on an excruciatingly boring conference call and we'd have to make the rest. 

But hey, we're old and soft in the middle, so first we went to get dinner. Priorities, people!! 

So, we got started at about 8:30pm and finally collapsed at about 1:30am. In that time, we'd managed to write, arrange, and record a full song, but ultimately couldn't do a real mix and release it into the wild. 

And then...well...then it took me until last week to finally mix the damn thing. Sigh. Sometime in the fall, I also overdubbed one extra guitar part (doubling the main riff and adding some weirdness to the B sections), but otherwise what you hear is what we recorded that evening and nothing else. 

I gotta say...I think it rocks pretty hard! There's something about a tight timeline that meant we couldn't overthink anything. It was as much instinct as anything else and I kinda like it. 

Oh...and here's a video of us setting up and making it!

Anyway, I hope you all are doing well and I appreciate you taking the time to read this and to listen. I really do appreciate it. 

'Til next time, 

Matt / Kid Bear