Firebirds …

firebirds is really special to me, so i can't even begin to express my gratitude for this sweet message.

firebirds has always felt like the scrappiest little song learning how to fight with its sincerity and weightlessness as a strength instead of a weak spot; flaming wings, clumsy flight paths, but all the determination and tenderness i knew how to tuck into as many molting molten feathers as stormy odds and sleepless nights and starry eyes and an already-ancient thinkpad could handle in 2012. your note feels like a little gust of wind gently lifting her wings again, and that means everything. thank *you* for carrying it close to your heart after all this time.

i super very much intend to get firebirds back on spotify/apple music/whatever else soon... sage and i should just re-record it, honestly, and their voice would still warm every inch (you should see them slaying the uke these days -- god, i could gush) but i'm painfully well-acquainted with my particular trap of wanting to change one thing, then ten things, then it's almost done almost done almost done WHOOPS it's been a million things and now it's a whole different thing... especially in old songs of mine ahahah ;_; the lyrics and vocal melodies are so clunky... but maybe there's a little charm in that somewhere.

that aside, even just put up more or less as-is, i've been pondering (for way, way too long, and in ways that keep getting one-shot by life before something can actually happen) how to get certain songs that're important and often asked for but missing from spotify like firebirds, starlight speedway, and armor back online in a way that won't totally suck and sound duct-taped together.

when i first made the cds for megaheart (and in doing so, made cds for dream catcher, you and me & the seven seas, and our tales), i nestled firebirds in at the end of the dream catcher cd, but you can definitely tell firebirds came later; the dream catcher (2011) stuff is a bonafide messssssssss aaAAAAAAgh... but firebirds (2012) has wicked different vocals and glimmers of songwriting intent that approaches what i'd do later on you and me & the seven seas (2013 - it was originally supposed to be part of it!) so it's kinda mismatched on dream catcher... maybe it would go on seven seas? but it can't go last, blue eyes is the culmination *of* firebirds, it even closes with it... but breeze followed by raicng meteors is The Opener for sure. SIGH. it's a puzzle.

even more of a puzzle: it's not easy to make any of it *not* feel mismatched. this would all be a TON easier if i still had the original instrumentals *and* vocal tracks (or the original computers/hard drives with directly openable project files especially) for anything older than... god, roller coaster eyes??? but soooo much has been lost over the years for a variety of (depressing) reasons, and it's really hard to make stuff sound congruent on an ep/album/collection/what have u if you don't have the ability to make changes to the individual bits.

i *did* have a huge backup of - not quite everything, especially pre-2010 - but a LOT; like, several whole eras of my life making music and art... but i didn't have a backup of *that* backup, lmao. so go figure: that backup fell on a very hard floor a couple years ago when i was in a rush in a mega bad stressed-out place, aaaaaaaand... it very much won't work anymore (mechanical hard drives are ridiculously sensitive to this stuff)

aaaaaaand...

i've gone over my options for ages on this and it pretty much comes down to at least a couple thousand dollars to even *try* to fix that drive, which is money i haven't had (and which anything close has had plenty else making wicked grabby hands for immediate priority over, one after the next, SIGH), with no absolute guarantee that everything can even be recovered, because the fun thing about mechanical hard drives is that they're inherently like "lol you bonked me so i wiped out 500 gigabytes of your life lol". womp womp.

so... it's been a really tricky work in progress revisiting everything rocket ship resort and getting it all in a place where i can do all of it justice; for the sincere souls like you who've sent stuff like this so selflessly over the years i've got a binder going, the curious following torn maps and asking for something that i might still have that - god - made up enough of a time of their life to try and track down each little piece of... and for the kid *i* was, dreaming and dreaming and dreaming in the face of everything in the world while knowing nothing in the world would ever stop me from fighting. so i do really really really want to. and to this day every time i get to play a piano anywhere for any reason the very first thing i do like muscle memory is play the firebirds riff...

E C C E C ... E C / F C C F C ... F C / G C C G C ... G C / F C C F C F C

E C C E C ... E C / F C C F C ... F C / G C C G C ... G C / F C C F C F C

and the synth intro right after, almost like a lil emotional boot sequence, which... heh, sounds as earnest and in tender love to me as the day i wrote it...

E C1 ... C2 G ... F G C1 ... F G G E C1 ... E E F / E C1 ... C2 G ... F G C1 ... F G G E C1...

*CUE BIG-ASS 80S DRUMS*