Saturday, February 9, 2019

Old is new, future is now: new album out early !!!

A while back I decided I would do a songwriting/recording project that included revisiting/rewriting old previously-unreleased songs from my early days of songwriting back in the early 90s when I lived in Vail, Colorado.  As the project work progressed, an unintentional theme revealed itself:  I had several songs about skiing; several that were either about the blues or the color blue or had blue or blues in the title and/or lyrics; and several that were about birds or flight or at least included that subject matter in the lyrics somewhere.  A logical album title emerged:  Bluebird Days -which seemed to cover all three aspects of this unifying common denominator and tie it all together neatly. As work on the project progressed even further, I realized I not only had bird and blue and ski songs, but that work on old ones sparked the creative muse to write some new ones as well, and next thing I knew I had enough for not one but two albums. 

So, the old songs got refreshed to become new, and then I thought why not name the second one with a roman numeral two after it, since both followed the same overall concept?  I could even re-purpose the same cover photo that my dad proudly took of my sister's old ski chalet on a sunny day after a bunch of fresh snow had fallen the night before:

It all made great sense to me, it was all coming together, and before too long I had 26 "new" original songs recorded, two albums done, ready to upload to my digital distributor aggregator CD Baby, who deliver to their partner site online music stores for purchasing, downloading, streaming and whatnot.

I thought it was cool that CD Baby delivers your digital album (not CD) to stores like iTunes, Spotify, etc. at "future" release dates you specify in a calendar picker widget thingy on their website.  So, as an artist, I sent them two albums a while back - one to be released in 2020, the other in 2022.  That way, I figured, if I die skiing or something, I'd have two more albums that would automatically be released in the future, and the massive royalties would sustain my heirs for generations to come.  Ha ha.  It's a nice feeling to have two whole albums "in the can."  This feature also allowed me to continue with my predictable, consistent release schedule commitment I made to my fans decades ago:  which was to release a new full-length album of self-written, self-recorded songs every two years in even-numbered years on my birthday, June 21st. 

I had just released "Missing The Boat" album in 2018, so with 2020 and 2022 all set, I wouldn't need to have another album's worth of material again until 2024, which would give me five glorious years of being able to really take my time to bring fans my best stuff.  All was going according to plan and life was good.

Then all of a sudden I noticed one of them was already in stores!  What?  And not even the first one, but the second!  Made no sense.  When I inquired with CD Baby, a series of email exchanges and even a phone call resulted in trouble tickets, research, vague and inconsistent answers from multiple employees, the last communication of which attempted to summarize the problem as follows:
"Both "Bluebird Days" and "Bluebird Days II" have correct metadata in our database and have not been released on the CD Baby store. However, it seemed that the more than three year timeline was too long to wait for activation on the partner sites.  Because this is an unfamiliar problem there are no fail-safes that would help to avoid a submission going live upon delivery despite having a release date in the distant future.  It's unclear what the specifics are for an acceptable timeline for future releases at partner sites."

Blah, blah, blah...

They gave me a free "future" album release credit after I complained nicely yet firmly.  Maybe I'll use it for a "best of" package, who knows.

Now you can see the remaining issue - you get a follow-up, sequel album before you get the original or what I'm now calling the prequel.  The II before the I.  The first Bluebird Days (which has no roman numeral I) apparently was somehow not affected by the same snafu, so is still scheduled to be released on June 21st, 2020 as planned, so you'll have to wait a year and a half for that one, but the second one from the future 2022 release year you can have way early (3 1/2 years early) and it's available now (in stores as of Jan. 29th, 2019 actually).

Similar things have been done before.  Guns N'Roses had a couple of albums called Use Your Illusion, but their first one actually had a roman numeral one in the title, whereas mine does not.  Later they combined the two into a compilation without the I or the II, or something like that.  But they intentionally used an "N" instead of the word "and" in the name of their band.  Lots of greatest hits albums have a volume I, II, or even III, which sometimes have songs on subsequent ones that were from the time period of previous ones if that makes sense, so that's a thing.

What's really weird is that Neil Young released a Chrome Dreams II album before the original, which wasn't released at all I don't think, which just happened to have as its first song a song titled "Beautiful Bluebird," and although I'm a fairly big Neil fan, I don't have that album, and I only learned this after reading about it on wikipedia a couple days ago.  Yet another example of the many strange coincidences surrounding this album of mine, such as the fact that it got mistakenly released on one of the coldest harshest winter days on record in Michigan during a polar vortex.

Sometimes things don't go according to plan, and sometimes it's good to break from tradition, shake things up.  Things happen for a reason.  It's best to go with the flow.

Some links for your listening pleasure:
Also, here's a page with more info:
For good measure, here's the page for the one you can't hear yet:

A link to a last-minute press release I scrambled to put together to embrace this mistake: