Musical Collaboration w/ my Bro

My brother, Ben, and I have been working together on a few musical projects.  We are just starting out on this creative endeavor.  He's producing, and I am singing and playing on my keyboard a couple of the songs I wrote many years ago.  You can see by the pic in the attached link that we are working from his small, in-home studio in his living room.  We've only had 2 short recording sessions so far, and we were very limited on time, so I did not get to re-record until I got the piano and especially my vocals where I wanted them.  I wish we would have had time for Ben to lay down some guitar tracks to insert into the songs, because I think that would add a lot to them, and also maybe some background vocals, harmonies, etc.  In listening to the finished product, I am mostly pleased, and am happy about the collaboration and my brother's amazing productive talent, but I am a bit frustrated by my pitchiness and by other details I know could have been a bit better.  Ben says imperfection is beautiful, so I am trying not to pick apart these amateur projects.  I do appreciate things that are "organic", so to speak, so I am gonna just let these be what they are.

Because these are older songs of mine that we are working on, they reflect emotions that are just not where I am at at this point in my life.  With a few exceptions, I've had song-writers block for a long, long time now.  There was a time in my past when I couldn't stop writing if I tried!  I miss the days when songs would just flow out me, although I do not miss some of the emotions that drove me to that creative deluge.  That time in my life was a like a melodic waterfall.  It has been surprisingly therapeutic for me to get the old stuff out. I am hoping that in doing so, it will free up creative space and that working with Ben will inspire some new musical productivity.

It's especially been fun for me to lay down my very vanilla tracks, and let my brother use his creative talent from a production aspect and just jack them up in a cool way and make the songs more colorful by adding in all sorts of melodical, rhythmical, and varying sound elements.  This is an adventurous segment of my musical journey.  I have to say, working with my brother is awesome, challenging and new.  I hope there will be much more of it to come.  After I was kinda beating myself up during our most recent recording session about not sounding like I wanted to on these tracks, he said this to me (I'm totally paraphrasing, but this is what I took from it): In creating music, the focus shouldn't be on the sound, nor how it makes you feel, but rather on the emotion and passion behind it, how it is perceived by others and how it makes them feel.  Hmmm.... something to think about.  I just love his philosophical nature!  It must run in the family. ;-)

Aaaaaaanyway, that was a long disclaimer, and a lot of words about nuthin', huh?  Ha!  ...Here is one of the projects we worked on recently.