Last night Gina and I held an epic Arcati Crisis rehearsal with our drummer Zina. We’ve worked our way up to eight drummed up tunes, and now we’re adding other special features like electric guitars and effects pedals.

We’re going to figure out this band thing, one way or another.

Meanwhile, I spent seemingly every free moment of yesterday singing the arpeggio D-F#-A-D-F#-A-D, which spans all the good bits of my singing range. However, on a weird set of vowels the top D can be a bit of a beast to get on top of, and of course I wrote myself just such a troublesome set of sounds when I penned “End With Me” shortly after posting about Eric Smith on Sunday night.

Can bad vowels stop me? Hell no. I mean, have you heard some of the audio on here from ten years ago? Not even bad singing can stop me.

Anyhow, here is a late-night first take on “End With Me,” another song from my soundtrack to Eric’s novel, Textual Healing. This tune has a slew of references to the book, including some specific lines. The recording has plenty of rough edges, but it sounds right, and I’ll take rough and right over mannered and plasticine any day of the week.

(Okay, not really, but let’s just think that for the purposes of this post.)