In May 2018, I was mixing for real and even if I love doing that, it’s agony all the same. I don’t know how many times I remixed the whole album, but 20 times is not an exaggeration. These days we use Dropbox to share files and I made MP3 mixes for Björn and Herbie to listen to and comment. The comments I got were usually variations on a theme of “it sounds great”. Ten mixes later the comments were “leave it now Phil. That’s enough!” My argument is that I can’t leave it until it sounds like an album and not just a bunch of songs. It must be coherent and I couldn’t leave it until I was as close to that as I could get it. In the end I stopped uploading to Dropbox until I was really finished.
One evening in early August we spent a couple of hours on the jetty by the lake listening to the album on a Bluetooth speaker making plans. On our way back to the house, we stopped on the huge lawn and looked at our shadows, which with the sun behind us were 10 meters long. Herbie had his camera with him and took a bunch of photos of our shadows. Before we got back to the house we’d decided that we had to use one of those striking images for the front cover. I changed the green grass to red/orange in Photoshop.
Mid-July to mid-August I did nothing with the album, or anyway very little. But once I got going again I quite quickly reached my mixing limit and couldn’t face doing it anymore. After mastering the whole album one last time, I uploaded it to the distributor for streaming sites and converted the album to an image for the CD pressing. And learned how to convert the texts on the back cover and the logo to vector. And the front cover had to be in CMYK not RGB. And it had to fit a template for printing. It all felt never-ending, but of course it did end. After listening to the same songs hundreds of times over the course of 10 months, I was not exactly longing to hear the album when the CDs were finally delivered on 17th September 2018. My normal reaction to a finished album is that it can take 6 months before I can bear to hear it again. That is not the case with A Padded Room. It took only two days for me to check it out and I listened to the whole album twice over. And enjoyed it! And again, the next day. No anxiety at all. There are one or two small things I could have done better, but it’s nothing I can’t live with. I’m a happy camper! W6C� B