Where’s the Stuff?

Ambitious me. Naive me. Almost a year ago I launched edgumbrecht.com with the simple intention of uploading songs and prose from my “archives”.  That’s a gloss on the heaps of stuff accumulated over years on old hard drives, flash drives, CDs, tapes and papyrus!  I thought, first to do the songs. Many, many songs. I thought, not just lyrics and notation, but recordings, as rough as they mostly are. Polish them and post ‘em up.  Then after the music, I planned to hang my sketches, short stories, screenplays and poems on the site.  And if anyone was still interested, finally, I’d reposit my novels-in-the-rough: Shadow of a Mouse, the Adjusters, and Silt.  That was my grand idea.

Reality check: today I have precisely sixteen songs recorded and only eleven released. The site lacks prose and verse and any other objects d’art.  It boasts about a dozen posts on the process of releasing music.

Truth is, the old songs and stories are hard to get too, need scrubbing, and distract from the good new ones that keep rolling in…

It’s time to rethink my plan.

Q:  Why did I start the site in the first place?

A:  Um, well, I hoped (still do) that some people will connect with and enjoy what’s there.

Alright then, as my partner and zen-master buddy, Carolyn, says, progress is progress and two albums is “not nothing.”  She makes me think maybe I should just start posting stuff “without being precious about it.” I tend to agree. Simple is almost always better.

So what next?

As for recorded music:  The second album will be done with mix/mastering any day. Then the streaming services will take a few weeks to pick it up.  I expect the release to be in February.  Meanwhile, I have started recording the third group of songs under the working title: The Devil You Know. Title track is a song about Finn McCool, Benandonner, and the magic of beer.  While that’s brewing, I’m going to begin sharing the gnarly-cuts and snippets of originals I have on hand.

As for the writing: I have copyrights filed now for most of the songs/poems and several of the stories.  I’m going to begin putting them up in batches over the next few months along with an index.  Nothing too dense.

I like to think now the website, like it’s namesake, will begin to focus on both the journey and the destination.

As always, I’d like to thank friends for checking in and checking out my stuff.  Thanks for streaming the initial songs from Apple, Spotify, Deezer, YouTube and Amazon nearly 30,000 times!  That’s not nothing.

Please keep sharing the music, the stories, and the journey with anyone you feel will enjoy them.