One of the things I love most about recording in one’s own home studio is the freedom to explore and experiment, and to slowly work on pieces of music, letting them evolve and become something other than what they began as. This works on the level of songs themselves, and also on the larger level of albums or collections of songs. In other words, if you’re always working on a bunch of tracks, all at varying degrees of completion, an album or collection begins to take shape. Some newer stuff gets added, some older stuff no longer fits, and suddenly you find yourself narrowing your focus to a dozen or so tracks that you’re excited to finish and publish. This is generally how Mystics Anonymous music gets recorded.
I am currently working away in the studio and planning to publish the next Mystics Anonymous album, Dreaming For Hours, sometime in 2013. I’m going to say April, but the truth is it’ll get done when it gets done. I say April because it’s my birthday in April, and on some level finishing another album could serve as my birthday present to myself. But anyway, the point is… this upcoming album has its first casualty now, and it’s a track titled Toot Suite.
Toot Suite is an instrumental track, and like a lot of my instrumental tracks, it’s inspired a little bit by jazz, a little bit by film score, a little bit by rock, and a little bit by experimental music. Most of all, it’s inspired by sounds, ideas, and that aforementioned freedom of exploration and experimentation. I really love it, and I really want people to hear it; however, as the album edges ever closer to completion, I find that this track just doesn’t seem to fit the feel of the larger work anymore.
For a while, I tried to justify leaving it in, taking my inspiration from such oddball album tracks as “Front Parlour” from McCartney II. But now I think, no. There is a way to share oddball tracks these days. Call it the 21st century version of the b-side. If you’ve got the resources, sometimes things like this come out on “extended versions” or “limited editions” of albums, such as Wilco’s The Whole Love Limited Edition Deluxe CD, which comes with a second disc of four extra tracks. But if you’re an underground, independent musician, chances are you don’t have these resources. You have the Internet. And though sometimes it can seem too large and too full, it is also a playground of discovery in which smaller artists thrive–not financially so much, but certainly in terms of access.
So, in that spirit, I present to you Toot Suite. Hope you enjoy it!