It’s with some amazement that we realized we now have 12 of 13 tracks done. That’s all the way done — mixed, lightly mastered, ready for release. I’m embedding ID3 tags and album art and the whole bit now. Only the final track is left to complete and that should be done in about a week’s time. It’s a little surreal to finally be at the end of this five-year mission, but it’s time to boldly go release it for people to hear. We will offer the album here as a free 320K MP3 album, and probably a FLAC download too.

Our attention is turning to other aspects of release now. We are going to offer the album for download here on the site, but that won’t be the only place to hear it. Since we were unable to secure a video partner, Kat is creating lyric videos for the songs, so people will be able to hear the whole album on YouTube; she’s almost done and we’re just finishing up the little things like end cards that link between songs and stuff like that. We’ll also upload the tracks to SoundCloud so you can listen to them there if you like. Our pages on YouTube and Soundcloud are on our list of links on our sidebar, so if you wanna bookmark…do so!

The other thing you’ll notice on the website sidebar is the tip jar. We always give our tracks away for free, but have been asked for years if fans can buy albums or even just send us donations. (We sell t-shirts but we make no profit from them — we figured having people wear our logo was thanks enough.) So we’ve decided to finally offer a tip jar for people who want to use it. As they have for the last decade, our tracks remain free, and that includes the upcoming album — but if you want to throw us a few bucks, you can now use the PayPal or Venmo links to do that. You choose the donation amount; whatever you choose, we’re flattered and we’re not going to say no. We’ll use the money to recoup some of the investment in our gear and the website.

Speaking of which, the website is about to incur a larger expense. We feel there’s a fair chance of this project getting some mainstream exposure (especially since it’s free, which is the internet’s favorite word), so we’re going to invest a little money into a beefier server setup, so nothing crashes. Lots of attention is a nice problem to have…right up until the moment it crashes your website. Many thanks to our old friend Matt Hancock for his advice on this front.

So…we’re agonizingly close now, and we’re looking forward to posting the darned thing. We’re still considering a few different dates, but when we do launch, it’ll be with all cylinders firing.