I made a record. Now what? (Part Deux)

How to survive album postpartum

As I mentioned in my first post, I’m always a bit lost after I finish recording an album. I just finished our new album ASHA and right on cue, here we are. I’ve been doing this with Elephant Stone for the past seventeen years or so, and I just know it’s coming every time. Doesn’t matter. Hits anyway.

Here’s the thing: you spend basically a year (sometimes longer, if you count all the writing that happens before you even hit record) with this thing living in the back of your mind at all hours. Every waking moment, some part of your brain is turning it over. A melody you haven’t quite cracked. A lyric that isn’t there yet. The mix on the second verse. And then one day it’s done. And that part of your brain that’s been quietly running in the background for twelve months just... goes quiet. There’s nothing there to fill the void.

It’s different every album. It’s also exactly the same.

Some years I finish a record convinced it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever made. I’m on top of the world for about two weeks. Then one morning I wake up and I’m absolutely certain it’s horrible. That particular swing is its own special kind of hell.

Other times I just throw myself straight into release prep; all the organizing, the logistics, the hundred little things that need to happen before an album can actually exist in the world. That helps. It’s something to do with my hands, at least. But those things take time, and there’s a lot of waiting involved, and waiting is not my strong suit.

I’m lucky that I have a day job. It keeps me occupied. Keeps me off the ledge, more or less.

Sometimes, I do something completely left-field. During COVID, I built a fence. I mean that literally. I went outside and I built a fence. Sometimes you just need something physical and finite. Something with a clear beginning and end, unlike a record, which never really feels finished so much as abandoned.

The most interesting version of this happened after Back Into The Dream. I was already in that restless in-between place, and my business manager Oko mentioned that one of his artists named Goldie was looking for collaborators. So I started working with her remotely; demoed a song, got really into it as a producer. The song turned out well. But I had my day job, my family, the release to plan; I couldn’t give the project what it needed. It fizzled. She’s actually huge now, and it’s very much not because of me.

But that’s kind of the point. In that post-album window, I was searching for something. Anything to redirect the energy, fill the silence, keep the engine running. Sometimes it’s a song. Sometimes it’s a fence. Sometimes it’s a collaboration that goes nowhere and a career you watch from a distance. Right now I’ve been focusing on sitar, tabla, and learning Led Zeppelin’s “The Rain Song.”

I guess that’s what I’ve learned: the slump is coming whether you’re ready for it or not. You can name it, you can see it arriving from a mile away, and it still hits. Every time. Album after album.

Album postpartum. That’s really the only way to put it.