I was in Seattle and am currently descending from the city that I love into the city of necessity that I absolutely hate. Hate is a strong word, but I keep the hatred strong because I feel that keeps my soul from blowing up into a thousand pieces, the practical result of which is beginning to find all of the false-boobed women in LA attractive–not going to happen. I don’t really truly hate LA in that I love Pasadena and the beach, so I guess I am really tricking myself into hating a city that I really kind of like with the goal of keeping my soul intact. I recently spent some time up in Seattle with a young lady who is moving to the lovely emerald city, and one of her reasons is that she is discovering that she likes LA, and that scares her–that realization is sticking with me.

Regardless, as you know by the fact that you are on this site, I am in the process of completing an album that honestly is a vast departure from where I usually go. The manifestation of this is that while I hope people will buy and download it (iTunes in a couple of weeks, hint, hint) I really did this one for me. Not that me writing music for other people and producing them has greatly increased the number of purchases. This project is called The Seattle Digital Orchestra as not only a tribute to the city I love, but also because I wanted to use the name years ago and a lot of people thought it would be better to use my own–as history will play out, they will be proven wrong.

It is an interesting experience to completely swallow your pride and put so much into a project that in the scope of everything has very little chance in being successful. It is also humbling to start a MySpace music page and begin to harass people to be your friend. I had the golden path laid before me, and the path went nowhere, so this project is strictly a labor of love. In a way, that is probably why it was so rewarding to do. I was writing an album for me, the culmination of an earlier life that I am now beginning to grow out of. Those of you who are close enough to me, or showed interest had a good chance of reading what I called my manifesto. The Seattle Digital Orchestra, along with many new good habits is the result of deciding to live differently and this will be this album’s legacy, and whether or not any of you give a rats ass about it, I will always look on it fondly, unless or course I completely revert.

You may be wondering why the album is titled “Before 3rd Stage.” Basically, on a moon launch, most of the unpleasantries of the flight occurred during the first two stages of the launch. The technical term for the 3rd stage is Trans Lunar Injection, which basically was the big shot that launched the capsule to the moon. The last song on the album is called 3rd Stage Ignition, and signifies my trip to the proverbial moon while the preceding songs on the album represent the first two stages of launch that were genuinely rougher than the post 3rd stage shot–unless of course you were on Apollo 13. I am somewhat embarrassed of that explanation because it sounds very smug and artsy, please believe me when I genuinely believe the analogy is fair and not some convoluted effort to make it sound more important than it really is.

The origins of the idea for the actual album are pretty much embodied in the first song “Chasing the Wind.” Most of the lyrics are ripped straight out of Ecclesiastes (from the preceding chapter to the famous Byrds song) and is Solomon’s lament that while he is the richest and most powerful man on the planet, it is all meaningless. That realization and my realization that achieving fame and fortune is essentially meaningless caused this album and my eventual moon-shot into what I am going to become. Remarkably as I write this my iPod decided to play me “Tears in Rain” off of the Blade Runner soundtrack, “All of these moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.” That is what I feel about this album, it is temporary and will be lost. As the last line in Chasing the Wind goes, “Men will forget me, but that won’t affect meaning.”

I firmly believe that meaningful life lies in the realization of the lack of meaning in what most of us live our lives for. If no one buys this album, yet I am able to maintain this paradigm of meaning, it will be infinitely meaningful, and since I claim I wrote it for me, that is the equivalent of going triple platinum.

However, I of course am a fallible human being–buy the album