It’s important to count your blessings. I have many, and one is a job where the interest overcomes the frustrations, even those of The System Waiting Behind The Bedroom Curtain. I had another productive and enjoyable day. The psychologist Mihaily Csikszentmihaily describes the state of Flow, where you are so absorbed in a task you lose all sense of time and self-preoccupation, and can expand masses of energy which is instantly replenished. For a task to induce flow it has to be sufficiently difficult to be challenging, but not so hard that you lose confidence; that’s how I feel about Document Object Model Javascript at the moment. The Jeremy Keith book is so good, and what I learn I can apply at work instantly.
Spent the evening at Split Level Studio in the second of two recording sessions for Rosie Bell. The first few guitar tracks for the first song went well, then I seemed to be unable to get the solo that was needed for a little break toward the end. Again and again we went round it, but music just wasn’t forthcoming. Then I got talking about the Tricia/Sean/Pete band where I’m encouraged to avoid conventional lead and play deliberately off-kilter stuff; Neil ran the song and I threw in some fairly random perversity The first take was just too irrelevant to the key and rhythm of the song. The second take was it. We then moved the best of the earlier takes to another part of the song and it fitted like a glove. The second song was a soft jazzy number and some understated chords did the trick. And the third number – well, we listened back to what we had, keyboards and bass, and decided it didn’t need guitar after all. So I packed up and came home, satisfied with the evening’s work.
Put together a Radio Blog for Out of the Bedroom, including Nobody Jones’s ‘Life, Death and Chocolate’, which includes the immortal line: ‘Fornication – well, that fills a hole’.