Feb. 11 is Get Out Your Guitar Day and it just so happened that I had a couple of quiet hours today to record some of my most recent songs.

My husband took the youngest boys to the park so the house was quieter than usual and I’ve been meaning to record these songs so I took advantage of this time.

One of my greatest dreams is to someday professionally record my songs, but being that each song would cost a few hundred dollars to record in a studio with professional musicians, for now I just use a digital tape recorder with a plug-in microphone.  I’ve done a couple of my songs with some  free downloadable recording studio software, but there always seems to be some kind of technical difficulty or another and the results with all the invested time doesn’t come out much better than just a simple recording so for now that’s what I’m doing.

I’ve learned that when you want to do something, you can wait until the perfect scenario comes along (until I have enough money for professional singing and guitar lessons and recording/producing/mixing of my songs) or I can just work on my songs, practice and record them with what I have and aim to take the next step when the opportunity becomes available. So this preamble is meant to be an explanation why the recording doesn’t sound so great, but at least you’ll have a sense of the songs.

One piece of advice I’ve gotten from the songwriting workshops I’ve been attending is that a song is a short story set to music. When you listen to a song, it should evoke some kind of feeling or tell some kind of story. So these songs are not all autobiographical, but are about things that touched me in some way or other.

This one is from a few months ago after writing an article about a domestic violence shelter. It’s called “Symptom of Your Love.”

“You Never Know” is about the idea of appreciating each moment because you never know if it will be the last one.

“Dandelion Dreams” is about the pursuit of following your dreams later in life.

“Sunsets Look a Little Faded” is an attempt at telling a story about the end of a relationship.

https://soundcloud.com/leisahphx/sunsets-look-a-little-faded