First song is in the bag!

Well, it's been a long time coming but at last, after an absence of more than three years, I once again find myself in Annie's bedroom.

Oo-err missus! No! Not like that. I was there to SING.

Yes, we've finally started recording for the second album. The songwriting process, interrupted as it has been by house moves, creative dry spells, changing jobs, other projects, and all the minutiae that life throws in the path of the struggling, part-time artist, has stretched from November 2005 - when we wrote the last of the songs for our first album - to now, when we decided it was about time to put voice to microphone and lay down some of the twelve new tracks we've been writing during those three-and-a-half years.

I had only the vaguest realisation somewhere in the back of my mind that it had been so long, but looking at the dates on some of the music and lyric files brought it home to me. The one we recorded tonight - Flight of the Raven - was written in April 2006!

And boy, am I rusty. It's been at least a year since I did any serious singing, so the first hour of tonight's recording session was spent trying to blow the cobwebs off my pipes and get back in the groove. But we got there in the end, and without THAT much help from Annie's clever pitch-correction software. I think she only needed to get that out of the kitbag once, although we did struggle to come up with a decent harmony line for the chorus.

The sense of achievement though, after two-and-a-half hours, when I sang the last line and we both nodded at each other in recognition of a good "take," was every bit as powerful as that first time back in 2005 when we recorded Broken Rules. We'll be doing this every Thursday for the next few weeks. I'll be impressed if we can maintain a rate of one song per night - we chose a relatively easy one to start with - but whatever the rate of progress, we've made a start. And as we all know, the journey of a thousand songs begins with a single note. Or something.