I sent the finished album to Mark Darby at Mighty Force last week. Then I waited.
Sending your music to the person whose label is releasing it, music you have been working on for more than two years, is a specific kind of nerve-wracking that I’m not sure has a proper name. You know they’re going to hear it. You don’t know what they’re going to think. You have opinions about it yourself, obviously, but your opinions about your own work are the least reliable opinions in the room. You have been too close to it for too long.
Mark came back with this: “Every track is excellent, and the sequence follows through to the end beautifully. Really lovely album, fantastic, well done.”
I read it probably ten times. Wow!
There is something about hearing that from Mark specifically that matters more than it might from someone else. He built Mighty Force the first time around in the early 1990s and rebuilt it pretty much from scratch in 2019. He has released music by artists I have admired for thirty years. He has ears that I trust completely. When he says the sequence follows through to the end beautifully, he means it in the precise, considered way that someone with his history means things.
Fragile World is coming in August on Mighty Force Records. I have known for a while that I was proud of it. Now I know that the person releasing it feels the same way.
That is a very good feeling indeed.
