I came across Shawn recently and was like damn this is a pretty darn cool song. So I contacted her about bloggin about the song here. She was cool about it. So here it goes…
The past 48 hours have been an interesting couple of days for me. I have a trip to Florida in my future in terms of my business plan for putting my CD out. I’ve decided to possibly rent my bus out while I’m working on securing my own tour. I’m knee-deep in a complete overhaul of my official website. Getting shut out from a big gig by a friend, and there’s the fact that I’ve been teetering on the edge of insanity recently. You’d know if you’ve been following Single of the Day for a while now.
I can kinda liken my situation to the story in Shawn’s song. I’m working on stepping away from all that has been weighing me down mentally. I think that there’s a lot of things that are getting a facelift in my life right now. I’m excited about the new version of the website. I’m excited that the Christmas CD is nearing the first round of mixes. Typing of the Christmas CD, I got the artwork from my dad, it’s fantastic. I have to do some colorizing of it, but the drawings are great. I’ll let you know when I’ve got it posted somewhere so you can see it. Hell I’m excited about being nominated for over 5 awards this year. How about that? Christmas and Hell in the same paragraph.
As for the website I’m pushing the edge of my abilities with it. It will be CSS/AJAX and Flash. I’m learning the AJAX stuff and my Flash skills are getting expanded big time. I’m creating a media player that looks like a futuristic iPod. It will play both music and video and operate very similarly to the iPod. There will be some other goodies in it too. But for now I’m still working on the guts of it because it goes way beyond the typical Flash based media players you currently see on the web. The site itself will be much more graphic and once it’s initially loaded it will be more responsive and have a few tricks up it’s sleeve. Unfortunately I’m going with open source standards so it won’t view perfectly in Internet Explorer (I’ll be supplying users of that browser a little message to say its time to move forward in life with a better browser).
Musicially I’m starting to get on with writing more original music for the next CD. I’m doing a lot of pre-production work this time around. So that I can really tinker with the songs until I’m very happy with them. I’ve already got frameworks of about 8 songs. But I won’t be recording as releasable until I’ve promoted Practical Insanity properly.
See lots of stuff moving forward. Putting some crap in the past and moving on. That’s the whole concept behind today’s song. I like this song on so many levels. One thing is that Shawn’s vocal isn’t typical of most female vocalists. She’s got a unique quality to her voice that feels familiar but different at the same time. I can’t think of another female vocalist to compare her too, yet I like it. That’s a great quality to have in my mind (maybe you the reader, listener has someone you can compare it to – let me know). The production is clean and precise without being distracting.
As you listen to the song several times you’ll start hearing little dabs of sound from different instruments here and there. There’s a few riffs in there that are pretty standard fair and probably in my mind would have been better left off, but hey it’s not my song and despite those little cliché bits they still work. They wouldn’t be cliché if they didnt’ work. That’s the great thing about it. It’s the additional dabs of painted sound in there that really pique my interest and keep me listening to it over and over.
If you haven’t heard of Shawn Vougeot before, you might want to keep it in mind, I think she’s got a good start to success happening. Ooh… I just thought of someone she could be similar to and I bet she’ll feel its an insult – Kelly Clarkson. Kelly has also stepped forward away from her past too, a living example of Shawn’s song. BTW, Vougeot is pronounced Voo-zhoh. Buy her CD now! You won’t be disappointed. How can you with songs like this?