As I am writing this I am listening to the latest mixes of vision 2020 (full version), the recording of additional instruments having been completed. JQ Whitcomb, as on Fete, wrote horn arrangements and recorded trumpet in the Summer. Robby Rothschild performed on cajon and djembe early in December and his brother Char played accordion on the last day of the old year.

Jon’s rules of Covid engagement are to record one person at a time and to allow no one into the control room. I could have attended the sessions via video link, but what’s the fun in that. Jon knows what he is doing, Robby tours with us and he has played on half a dozen of my albums and both JQ and Char delivered great performances for Fete. So I enjoyed sitting back and waiting for the recordings to appear in my Dropbox.

This week I added the last tracks to the recordings and worked on placing the instruments onto the sound stage. I have a very simple method of arriving at a mix I love: I listen and make notes about anything that bothers me. Then I make changes to the mix, whether it is an edit or a tiny change in a reverb setting, or raising the volume of an instrument by less than a db. It’s not that I try to remove any sharp edges, because some of those edges are like spices in a curry, it’s rather that some edges are good and others are not. I try to remove the ones that don’t work for me.

Today I listened to the album without finding a catch, a catch being a musical event that takes me out of the flow. I will listen a few more times and if I don’t notice anything that should not be there, then the album is done and will indeed be released this January.