Today is Day 21 of Gwen Bell’s Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. The prompt/question for today is: Project. What did you start this year that you’re proud of?

1. finishing music for my next album

I started gathering ideas in ‘08, culminating in approximately 60 short snippets of recorded music on my computer.  At the start of ‘09 I began the much more difficult job of editing and refining the best of these ideas.  Out of these 60, I decided on 8 that would become my next album.

I even recorded a proper demo of the tunes once they were at a fairly complete stage.  I’ve never bothered to demo stuff before.  I’m so glad that I did, because now I can sit with these tunes for a while and make decisions about arrangements before going in to record the real thing.

Here’s a demo of “Chet & Chomsky”…

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I’m planning to record and release my next album in 2010.  How I’m going to pay for it is another subject altogether.

2. this website/blog

With the help of the lovely Robin Senior, I created this website in the summer of ‘09.  It’s my very first website…and blog.

Since I (officially) revealed this site to people on September 1st, 09, I’ve kept my commitment to post 2x/week (every Tuesday and Friday) for at least 6 months.  Of course, I’ve been blogging every day in December as part of this challenge, but I’ll be returning to my regular schedule in January.

Something clicked for me in ‘09 when I finally realized how essential it was for me to have a home base online.

This site is now almost 4 months old.  Awww.

3. TUXEDO!

The idea for the band was simple and superficial: I have a black telecaster, Joey has a white telecaster.  “We should start a band where I wear a white suit and play my black tele, and you wear a black suit and play your white tele!…We’ll call it TUXEDO!”

And so, precisely 12 months ago Joey Wright and I debuted our new band TUXEDO!  With Paul Mathew on bass and Kieran Adams on drums, we play ridiculous novelty country instrumentals a la Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West.

This is definitely one of my favourite things to come out of 2009.

(oh -  and we’re playing tonight (Dec 21st 2009) at the Cadillac Lounge in Toronto)

photos by Tanja Tiziana