For the last month or so, I’ve been working on my next album. I haven’t had a lot of time, so I’ve had to do it in a way similar to how I did it on my two-year religious sabbatical: in my head. That’s not a very fun way, but it’s effective. The problem I face is that I don’t have a band. I have no way of knowing what a song will sound like until it is recorded. So I have to imagine it in my mind and make guesses about what will sound good together. It’s not really my favorite.

When I’m working on an album, I like to be very organized about it. I make charts and tables and I record demos and I have different folders in Google Docs for which step of the process each song is in. I just finished the arrangement step for all 11 songs on this new album, which means that all the songs are now in the “Record” folder, every column on the album chart has an “X” except for “Recording,” and my iPod has a playlist of demos of all 11 songs.

I haven’t decided which part is harder–the recording or the arranging. Recording takes longer, but arranging requires me to use my imagination without getting any sort of feedback from the actual sound of the thing. It’s hard to be creative and original when I am writing things down like “Guitar on left plays riff 1″ or “Acoustic strumming” or sometimes even just “Strings” and hoping that, when I record, I’ll remember what it was that I thought would be so great about that.

Anyways, I’ve got 11 pretty good songs on tap for this upcoming album. I’m hoping to get it done sooner rather than later, but you never know with these things.

Oh, and by the way, if you haven’t done so already, go listen to my first album, Better Than You’d Think. It really is.