The Album Play-by-Play

With the 2009 RPM Challenge just around the corner, I thought I would start a blog that will give the PLAY-BY-PLAY of a minor- (nano-) league band writing and recording another "album" (Astronaut Aardvark Attack's third) all in the month of February. Once February is over, this can remain a play-by-play of a band's (presumed) struggle to "reach" fans.

Astronaut Aardvark Attack has been my wife, brother, and me with some guest artists showing up on some songs. We all have non-music careers, but love playing, listening and writing music. All of the AAA's songs were written by one or all of us. Some of the "guest artists" have been really spectacular and all just friends of ours who had some amazing talents. We came up with the name for the 2007 RPM Challenge primarily because it started with an "A" and the 2006 RPM Challenge listed all artists by alphabetical order. It is always hard to wade through songs without a clue as to what you are getting without first listening (entirely different topic altogether), hence we chose to place ourselves toward the top. I thought the name was funny and we added this picture:

which solidified my feelings toward the name (that's an aardvark in front with an astronaut helmet bending its snout). We had also come up with "Spin Cycle", which I liked because we addressed ourselves in terms of laundry, such as: "Discover our Dirty Laundry (bios)" , etc. Despite a friend of mine suggesting, "wow, no one's going to stumble onto that one, are they!" we've stuck with Astronaut Aardvark Attack.

Our previous songs (all of the finalized ones are posted) have been pretty diverse and I'm quite pleased with many of them. It may be difficult to pinpoint us in a specific genre, however, which I think is good and bad - good because it means it may be a fairly unique sound; - bad because if no one has heard of us, and are looking in the "Rock" genre, they may not get what they are looking for. Further, everything has been home recorded and it is not altogether straight forward to mix an album - it is in fact an art in and of itself. We didn't have the best technical skills in mixing - although some were better than others - but we were happy with a lot of the songs. This time around I hope we've gained some additional skill in mixing, and hopefully in song writing as well.

February 1 begins the challenge, and thus the writing and recording for another 35 minutes of music or 10 tracks.

So...Astronaut Aardvark, Attack!