I've been thinking a lot this summer, unsurprisingly, about apologies and absolution. Who gets them, who doesn't; the power dynamics of forgiveness; the gestures and actions of atonement; the apologies I should have made, the ones I shouldn't, the ones I'll never get, the ones that still haunt me.

The meditation is turning into a sort of Aimee Mann–ish ballad. I like it a lot so far, though there are some significant gaps in the lyrics, and I barely have verses at all.

In the larger scope of the year's songwriting, there are two basic styles duking it out. More and more I think that I'm working on two albums, not one. The themes feel too disparate to belong in the same place. I seem to have to write a certain number of country/roots songs in order to write a similar number of pop/rock songs. (This happened with Highway Gothic too, though we only recorded the one album that time; there are still a number of unrecorded compositions from that process. Of the ones that made it onto the album, "The Age and the Ache" and "White Flag" were the closest to the country/roots feel.) For now, I'm thinking of the roots collection as Backroads, and the pop—or whatever it is—as Posthistoric​. 

Sometimes things do not work on the first try and there's nothing you can do but scrap them and start over. Essential to have a clear labeling system:

(This is some music from The Dancing Plague, which I scored for Right Brain Project in 2016. I used some samples that mean I can't ever distribute it online, but it was a fun bit of composition nonetheless.)

Early this year—at a point when this still seemed like a large personal loss—I learned that Moleskine had stopped making its pocket-size music notebooks, on which my creative process has depended for most of my adult life. (They do still offer a bigger music notebook, but one, it won't fit in an evening bag, and two, my songwriting process seems to need the smaller pages. There are a lot of false starts in songwriting, and I don't like taking up a whole big page just to write what may not come to more than a couple of lines.)

The closest replacement I could find was this Roterfaden model, with a dot grid on the verso and staff paper on the recto. The red stamp on the front was nicely old-school, and the pages were the right size. But it did not have a cover. This was a problem: any notebook of mine is going to be carried around, smushed, beat up, and eventually used as a coaster. Roterfaden sells very nice customizable leather covers, but they are well beyond my budget. 

So! I made my own. Here's the process, for anyone who might want to try it. This makes a flexible, tough cover, similar to oilskin. You could incorporate board for a true hardcover, but I think you'd have to do that with library paste rather than sewing.

From some past sewing projects, I already had decent-sized scraps of cork fabric, lining, ribbon for the bookmark, and quarter-inch elastic for the strap. (To make masks this spring, I had to buy 50 damn yards of elastic; all smaller quantities were sold out. I have half a football field of black elastic. Hit me up if you need some.)

Roterfaden's custom bindings include a metal clip that attaches the notebook to the cover and lets you replace the inner pages as needed. After a bit of time perusing r/notebooks, I determined that the best option was probably a wallet clip. So I ordered that from a craft supply shop, and it was the only thing I had to buy new.

I cut front and back pockets from the lining fabric. Each was 12 cm x 16 cm. Mistake #1: they should have been slightly narrower. (This fabric and the cork cover are both from the delightful Oak Fabrics, btw.)

I pressed and hemmed the pockets around all four edges. Next, I hand-stitched the long spring side of the wallet clip to a rectangle of lining to make the spine. Mistake #2: the spring is shorter than the spine, and that means the notebook sits a little crooked in the finished cover. I should have put piping or a pipe cleaner in the top bit of the spine to even things out.

I folded the rectangle over and stitched it to the inside of the cork to set the spine. The clip adds a lot of height to the fabric, so to stitch alongside it, you have to use a zipper foot. Mistake #2.5: I very clearly didn't get the fabric straight here. (At this point I had already had to push away Arthur multiple times, and I just wanted to finish before he succeeded in his baffling but constant goal of eating thread.)

Portrait of an unrepentant thread-eater, banished to the windowsill:

Next step was to set the pockets, the bookmark (brown), and the elastic strap (black). Here's the pinned assembly. Since the elastic strap is a loop, you have to leave a gap in the bottom seam. After sewing the rest of the edges, hand-stitch the bottom of the strap into place. (There may be a different way to do that, but I am not an experienced enough sewist to figure it out.)

And that's it! Not a moment too soon, as I have already inflicted some damage on the front paper. This isn't a shining bit of perfect precious workmanship, but it does the main job and looks kind of nice. And now I know how to do it again, should the need arise.

Here's an early draft of "Bender," the track we cut from Highway Gothic. (We'll still make it available on the four-side extended LP, when that's possible.) 

The idea for the song came its first line, "I need you like the devil needs an advocate." It's pretty much all similes from there. Unfortunately good similes are difficult to write.

Anyway there were a lot of swings and misses on this one, some quite feeble indeed. (That is, tbh, one of the reasons the song is so short.) I had completely forgotten about the line "I need you like Lost needed a season 5." Presumably the verse would've concluded "That must be the reason I've / Binged it all again." 

One of these days, if live concerts are a thing we can do again, we ought to play the draft versions of things. Including Thomas's version of "O Chem" ("Telephone, Jellophone...").