Demos

I’ve been hesitant to post working demos here. It seems a bit like asking Miss America to do her swimsuit modeling first thing in the morning. She’s still good lookin’ and all, but her hair’s a mess, she has morning face, she hasn’t had any coffee… etc.

We have 11 working songwriting demos. We really, really like them. They’re in various stages of ugliness, depending on how much I wanted to invest in the individual demos before I was exhausting my creative mojo getting bogged down in minutia that should be dealt with later. Erica’s vocals are not to be found on them, leading several people to ask… so are you doing a solo project or what?

No. The Dailies is Chad and Erica Reisser, always.

Erica still teaches voice part time, about 20 hours a week. There are several hours of prep and busywork that buttress that time. Erica is also a mommy to two young children, and anyone who has kids knows that that is some seriously heavy lifting. On top of all that, she is supposed to finish her day and then come in and be creative with me.

A while back, we decided that since I had quit my job to do this, that I would be doing the heavy lifting on the front end. It’s kind of my bag, anyways. Erica has editorial gifts that are really stunning, and the songs that you will hear have been totally shaped by her sense of melody, and lyric. Sometimes I’ll have an idea that I think is brilliant, but it needs to be refined after I pour it onto the page in a frenzy of couplets and chord changes. She has gotten more creatively involved in this project in the early stages than she was on What it Is. In fact, one of my very favorite new songs (called The Tide) is based on a little guitar riff she wrote up and played for me.

So I hesitate to present them to you here. I’m afraid you’ll judge them prematurely. Every single note that we’ve been listening to on these demos for the past 2 months will eventually be replaced. Every note. These are blueprints, a test run. A rough animation. An animatic, I think they call it in the film world. They’re created to tell us, the artists, if we’ve stumbled onto something (or things) worth keeping. We think they are.

Maybe I’ll get over my fear and trust you, the listener, to hear where we’re going, and decide to take the journey with us.