Author: ericdin5@gmail.com

Crazy. When I started making “solo” recordings, it was like, therapy. Something I had to do. I wasn’t planning on making an album. Who listens to albums anymore? Eventually I decided just go ahead and compile all of my “solo” stuff into a very long double CD. But once I got to work compiling that, I changed my mind, and decided I wanted it to be something that I can listen to from start to finish. So I cut it down to 13 songs. Putting them in a running order that felt right and musical, and lyrically flowing, was a real challenge. It’s done. Peter and Shannon are doing the artwork, and we’ll release it in early 2022. On Berkeley Cat Records, of course. Thanks everyone who encouraged and put up with me along the way. Before the end of this year, I’ll start making some public posts about it. For now, this is a thank you to my friends. I love you.

Oh and I renewed this domain for another year. I just can’t bear the idea of someone putting some yucky ads on it like happens when you let a domain expire. Moral of story: Don’t buy domain names! It’s a trap! LOL much.

This site actually gets basically no traffic so maybe I’ll use it to bleat things to the very few who may find it 🙂 I feel sneaky. Hiding in plain site

Guffaw

Was that an Alice Cooper song? Not quite but anyway! This is an artifact now. A web artifact. These are a thing. See, I noticed that now that I have Berkeley Cat Records up and napping, I don’t really tend this site as an active domain anymore. But I don’t want to let it lapse because then some domain-buying crawler will swoop it up and put some kind of spammy porn ads on it or something. Somehow the words Peace and Love and Rock and Roll are important enough to me to want this little web artifact to at least remain as originally intended. It was an idea for an album, which started as an EP, on a highway outside of Houston, in early October of 2015, shortly after my dad passed away. Where that is now, is a nearly completed Eric Din album with a different title. My running title now, which I think I’ll probably stay with, is (drum roll please):

Eric Din sings the songs of Eric Roy Dinwiddie

A) because I think it’s funny and B) because it’s true. There were some old albums with titles formatted like that – someone sings the songs of someone else – so why not this?

Did ’em one song at a time. The latest, which I’m releasing soon, is Jupiter Girls. I wanted one more very pop song, or, pop as I hear pop, pop to my ears and heart, which is undoubtedly different from “pop” as one might use that genre description today. Pop is the least specific of all genre names, isn’t it? To me it means.. well, it means what I did in Jupiter Girls! I hope you will like it.

Most of the tunes on the upcoming aforementioned album are already on my BandCamp page. Most are finished, but a few of them I am remixing. That’s another new development. Somewhere along this road I learned to mix, and even master, my own recordings. Ears and patience and need got me there. It’s expensive to always have to ask someone else to mix or master a track. And I have wonderful cats in my credits, and I imagine I shall call on them again. But more than money, it’s creative control. If you really, really know how you want something to sound, you kinda gotta put your own hands on it. Like, I wouldn’t ask someone to play a guitar part for me unless I thought they could do a better job of it than me. So it is with mixing, and I guess I just had to get to a point where I trust myself enough with that. It’s sort of demystified for me now. Not going to say I’m an expert yet, but, here’s the thing. I record everything at home now. I track one instrument at a time and as I go I set the tone the way I want it for each thing. So when the tracks are done, the mix is really sitting there already. Not much to mess with, if I’ve done a good job to that point.

I’ve sent my tracks to Shannon Wheeler as I go. And he’s sent me these beautiful record cover images. So now a dilemma is how to use them all AND have a new album cover. I have a solution, a web album on Berkeley Cat Records and possibly, if I really lose my mind, a CD booklet. Vinyl? OK I have lost my mind.

Peace and Love and Rock and Roll was going to be the title of a vinyl LP, when I first conceived of it, a few weeks after writing and recording Sweet Lacy Anne. Sweet Lacy Anne is a finished track; I’m putting it on the album as-is. But the original album title has not stood the test of time with me, and it seems a bit limiting somehow. So “Part 1” will remain an EP until maybe, someday, a part 2 reveals itself. And this domain will probably not see more updates. I have too many domains, apparently, as I have complained about, here. Making an attempt today to catch up on some updates and reorganize things a bit.

2020 – FFS – what a year. These last 4 years have been brutal. The earth is besieged by idiots. May they be returned to the lunatic fringes where they belong. I will quote myself from my song, Always For A Moment:

“Let’s put our best and brightest
Back at the grown-ups table,
Stop the madness, save the world,
Yeah, and free the people”

That’s about what I was trying to get at with all this. We can still do it.

I’ll be over at Berkeley Cat Records, makin’ peace and love and rock n’ roll.

Hey, I started a record label! Making solo records and posting them here sort of led me to think, hey, I want my own label instead of putting them up as Distrokid/whatever my number was. So I thought, I need a label name! And chewed on that for a while before Berkeley Cat Records sprang to mind much like a cat springs to a tunafish-catnip patch. Yes.

So this site will be semi-retired, and some of the songs here will be re-published on Berkeley Cat Records, either remixed or rerecorded or just as-is, at my spontaneous whim. I’ll keep this site up for posterity and I’m adding SSL finally so it wont say “INSECURE!” in the Googlenets. Does any of this make sense? No, no it does not. Why should it?

Berkeley Cat has already re-released one UpTones gem from the 1980s, and two Eric Din singles. So busy. More to come soon from various wonderful Berkeley cats TBA.