North Hollywood, California
And we're bookin' along. Never at the pace I want to be bookin' along at, mind you, but that's just how I sort of am in my life in general! Never fast enough! Especially as I get older. But never mind that...

The important thing is, Leo's been making astounding progress the last couple of weeks. Not only has he been recording like crazy for our demo, but he wrote a lot for the remaining tunes over the weekend when he was in Spokane for Bugs Bunny on Broadway! My legacy will be that most of the libretto was written at my former place of employment. Leo's will be that the music was written in Toronto, Burbank, San Antonio and Spokane!

Anyway, it turns out we have different approaches to recording music. Now, mind you, he's the one with all the classical training and writes symphonically, while my experience is writing pop songs that require more knowledge of looping than it does about actual music. When I want to do a song, I usually pick out all my sounds first before I record anything, or at least get it narrowed down and then see how they sound together. Leo's process so far has been laying down a piano track as a guide, and then, by his own description, throwing everything but the kitchen sink at it and seeing what works and doesn't work. And often, he will come back to a composition after a couple of days and not only shape it and edit it, but reconstruct the entire thing, throwing out his original ideas.

It's been a bit of a challenge when he plays his work for me because of this, because when I hear it I've been regarding it as a finished product. But I've slowly been learning to understand that what he's doing is work in progress. Still, it's hard for me to not want to make comments and suggestions, because sometimes the songs sound different than I envisioned or it's evoking something different than I intended, or I don't like this instrument or it doesn't sound period enough. I'm difficult to please; what can I say. :) But I have to say that he's been doing phenomenal work, and currently it seems the demo will be done in early May, which comes as a relief. We've got 14 months and I find myself becoming more and more aware of time being of the essence.

Speaking of time, the only thing I'm really a bit concerned with at this point is the length of some of the songs! We've got so much ground to cover with the show as a whole that I feel most of the songs can only be so long, since we can't put on a 4-hour show. But, there's still a lot of dialogue than be cut out and/or tightened, so I've decided just to let the songs' lengths slide for the purpose of the demo. We won't really know how long the show is until we start our readings this summer, and we can go from there when we find out. Again, I tend to come at artistic ventures as finished products rather than works in progress...and how many finished products in art do you know of that didn't go through several incarnations before becoming finished products? So this is one of the lessons I'm learning from the demo process, and I guess the whole dang musical...

I still have to finish the two-line ending for It's In My Nature...Lord knows I've tried but it just seems to flummox me for some reason! The only up side is that, since the song is on the demo and it's going to be recorded soon, I have no choice but to finish it. Again, it's frustrating to not have this stuff come out perfect the first time! Ah, for those days last summer and autumn, when I was fired up to write the libretto almost every day and words just flowed like a stream trickling through Lover's Lane...