Check out more of Ryan Alexander Lloyd’s work here.

A few weeks ago I got an email from a guy called James, who wrote to tell me about a remix of Darkwave he had created. His email came totally out of the blue, as it has been ages since I posted the Darkwave remix pack (which is still up, btw). I was pretty excited honestly. Kind of like finding a $20 dollar bill in some old pair of jeans that I’ve completely forgotten about.

Anyhow, not only was I stoked that someone had remixed Darkwave, but the remix itself is super creative and very beautiful. James rearranged the song, added vocals of his own, wrote a few new lines of lyrics (I love that he did this!!!), and more. He really made it his own, so I asked James to tell me a bit more about his remix:

“I used to listen to the song a lot, and got the remix pack when it came out, but never got around to do doing anything with it. Recently I’ve become obsessed with the idea of remixes, and making music production less uni-directional. I associate Darkwave with a particular time in my life which I havent really made peace with yet, and reworking this song in my own voice seemed to be a way of achieving some closure.”

James plans to put out a release with more covers and remixes this year, so if enjoy this one, make sure you check out more of his music, as well as his label/blog Papaiti Records.

Download the remix right here, and feel free to share this remix in any way you want.

I thought I would show you a screen shot of my Excel chart that I use to track the progress on the new album. Each row is actually preceded by working titles of songs, but I cropped them out in this image, as it’s all still a bit hush, hush :).

But yeah, there are 12 rows, so you can rightly infer that there are 12 songs in the running (out of roughly 22 original contenders). Whether or not I use all 12 I won’t know until they’re done.

So yeah, the colors pretty much mean what you probably already guessed: green is complete, yellow is partially done, and orange means I haven’t really started on that yet.

Now the reason I haven’t done any vocals yet, is because I am saving them for last. When everything else is pretty much done, I’ll record all vocals in a span of a few weekends. I want to do this to ensure a really consistent delivery. I also want to give myself the option of recording them somewhere where it’s more quiet, so I might take off and record them in a more remote location when the time comes.

As you can see, aside from vocals, the main area of work remains to be done on guitars and pianos, as well as lyrics.

Lastly, you’ll notice one song at the bottom has no green at all. That’s because I just started writing it a few days ago. It’s the last new song I’m allowing myself to work on until this album is finished.

Whatever else remains to be done, the one thing I am loving about this graph is the amount of green!

Now back to work…

A few months ago I read an interview between Derek Sivers and Seth Godin and couldn’t stop re-reading this particular paragraph:

“Sure, some music that’s great is great for the ages and it’s okay that’s it’s not being heard, but so much of what people call great isn’t actually great, it’s merely “very good.” Very good music goes unheard every day, because very good music is not in short supply. There’s a huge surplus of it.”

“I’ve sampled hundreds of songs on CDBaby and I can say that almost all of it is very good. And virtually none of it is great, if we define great to mean music I need to buy, to give away, to talk about to everyone I know.”

I have to admit: reading this really shook me up. How much of what I had released, had been truly great? How much material have I released that I knew to be “merely good” or “interesting”?

Hand on the heart? I’ve probably released my fair share of songs that I could have made better, had I worked harder, had I thought more deeply about the song, had I had more confidence in my ability to turn good into great through sheer work and determination.

Now, perhaps there was once a time where it made sense to just get on with it and start releasing music, but whatever the case for that might have been, that period is now over.

Therefore, I hereby promise you that – from this day onwards – I will only release a song after I’ve done everything I can to make it the best song it can be. And while this will not guarantee that everything I ever release will be great, or perfect, or even close to it, I promise you that in the future, when I fail, I will fail because my very best efforts were not good enough, and not because I was too scared and lazy to really try. Pinky swear.

So, how does this promise impact the making of my new album, In Perfect Blooms Of Color?

Well, for one I am working a lot harder to make the music more beautiful, more memorable, more structured, more polished. I’m also doing my best to raise my production standards to the next level. Not only do I want the songs to sound better, but I want the sounds and performances to be more nuanced, rich, and more expressive.

In addition, I’m finally allowing the needs of specific songs to trump my concerns for genre identity, “indie-cool”, or listener expectations. I’ve often had ideas that I ended up self-censoring because they wouldn’t “sound like Enright House”, or because I was worried I would alienate people who had grown to love my music as it was.

But I’ve finally come to realize that worrying about all of this only drains my creativity. In fact, it’s enough to turn a sane man positively neurotic.

Thus, if a song now sounds better with brass, I include brass – no matter that I’ve never used brass before. Now, if a song benefits from a 4-to-the-floor rave kick drum, then that’s what’s going to happen – no matter that I’ve never before written a song that one could dance to. If a heavily auto-tuned vocal a la Cher sounds perfect for a particular song, then a heavily auto-tuned vocal it is! – no matter that its sonic signature is almost exclusively associated with top-40 pop music.

In short, if an idea sounds good, if it makes the song better, and if it excites me, it’s in – whether it fits into a previous Enright House canon or not.

There are other ways, too, in which I am working to improve my music. For one, I’m trying really hard not be lazy about lyrics. I’m trying to dig deeper, be more straight-forward, less cute, less sentimental, and, generally, just a tad braver. No doubt I’ll be making myself quite vulnerable with the new lyrics, but I’ll own that. I’ll write my heart out, and when people start making fun of certain lines – and I’m calling it right now that there will be those people who will – I’ll take it.

But the biggest thing I’m doing to ensure that In Perfect Blooms Of Color will be the best thing I’ve ever done is by preventing you from ever hearing the vast majority of it. If a song is “good”, it’s out. If a song is “very good”, but doesn’t really inspire me, then it, too, is out. Good is no longer good enough; like Seth pointed out, there’s already too much of it out there as it is.

So, hang in there with me. I think it will be worth it.

xOx

I scared the living daylights out of my partner, Mary, the other day. Two weeks ago I noticed that my remix was #9 on the RDU charts, and thought I would check to see how it was doing this week.

Hand to the heart, I was certain it would be out of the charts. You know… a dip in / dip out kind of situation.

I was so shocked when I saw it was #1 this week, I literally shrieked!

Thanks to all you cats over at RDU who have been spinning the remix. And sorry, Mary, for making loud, scary noises. XoXo!

Two weeks ago I took a trip out to Fire Island with my partner Mary. That, incidentally, was also the weekend where the winners of the remix competition were announced. Thanks to your support The Enright House managed to take the popular vote! Unfortunately, that didn’t quite decide the overall winner. Out of the three highest ranked remixes The Mint Chicks would eventually pick the winner, and well…

…they picked a funk remix from Poland.

Not sure I totally saw the logic in that choice (musical or otherwise), but honestly… when you’re walking down beaches like this, who cares, right? Ultimately, all of you ended up voting my remix to the top (out of 16 entries non the less), and that’s really all I could ever have hoped for. So thank you for making that happen!

So yeah, no worries re. not winning the grand prize – as Will Ferrell put it so well: “Matt Lauer Can Suck it!”

Check out more photos from this blissed out trip:

Oh yeah, and P.S. my remix just dipped into the top-10 RDU charts last week. Radness!

So yeah, musichype.com posted this remix competition for The Mint Chicks, who are a totally choice New Zealand band.

“Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No!”, in particular, is a really great song, so I was quite excited to have an opportunity to remix it.

Does it sound like an Enright House remix, though? Well… It’s a rad, trancy throwback to early 90’s euro-rave, mediated by piles of exuberance, some beautiful chord progressions, and a smitten of Enright House aesthetics.

Download your remix here: Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No! (Enright House Remix)

So, something really sweet just happened. My friend John, who runs a boutique DIY label called Mine, All Mine! Records just offered to add my latest live recording of Darkwave to his label’s catalog.

John and I actually collaborated earlier last year when we released a spilt EP called “Together”, and we also played a show together in his basement in Madison, Wisconsin during the US tour.

What’s really cool about John picking up Darkwave is not so much that more people will hear it – obviously that’s a totally rad bonus – but what excites me most about this is that it serves a wonderful reminder to me how fellow musicians and personal friends can do kind and darling things for each other.

It’s little gestures like these that mean everything to me, because that’s all my career in music has ever amounted to: a series of small gestures by people who believe that what I do holds value.

Whether it’s a guy in an office who listens to a song of mine and agrees to book me at his venue, a person who is passionate about music and decides that one of my songs is good enough to include in his or her podcast, a friend or family member who buys an album or a t-shirt from me, or a total stranger that falls in love with a song of mine and cares enough about it to sent out a tweet or facebook message to his or her friends.

It sounds so insignificant, perhaps, but you take all these things together, and that’s all there is.

And that’s why I am so infinitely grateful to friends like John: he’s always kind, always supportive, and it’s the little gestures and offers to help out where he can that just flat-out make my life a happier one.

So, here’s to Mine, All Mine! Records and my buddy John: thanks for being an awesome friend and finding value in my music.

Download “Darkwave (Live In Auckland)” from any of these places:

• Bandcamp (MP3 and many more formats)
• Internet Archive (Ogg Vorbis or Flac)
• Mininova (MP3 Torrent)

Feel free to spread the word by using the facebook or tweet buttons below. Hugs!