Protagonist is NOW available!
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Thanks to all who helped meet the Kickstarter goal! Click here to see the complete list of supporters.
9/17/2013 | Recording…
Producer Melissa and the kid: two people that are making me pretty happy these days.
Hey there Protagonists! We had a great all-day recording session on Sunday. Producer-engineer Melissa Ferrick showed up with all of her millions of gear and twisted lots of knobs and measured big microphones’ distance from one another (this is I’m a poet-not-a-musician speak for “the woman seems to know what she’s doing, though I’m not clear on what that is at all times.” I always felt this way while traveling and doing sound checks with Pamela, Lyndell,Ember, and Chris..). Melissa is also doing the music for the tracks so I’ll get an audio glimpse into that next week. We have one more recording session to lay down vocals in a few weeks.. but we’re pretty sure this project will be ready before the holidays.
Also, I’ve never done this before, but I am working on one last poem and I would like to know what’s on your minds…. that is to say, what are you wondering about, what are you waiting for, what are you grieving, what are you witnessing? These thoughts would be helpful to me as I approach the last track. You can email me here or at: alixolson@yahoo.com or post on facebook if you’re the public type;)
I’ll leave you with a few pics of Melissa and the kid: two people that are making me pretty happy these days.
In Solidarity. Alix
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1113399771/alix-olson-the-protagonist-project/posts
Alix Olson and the Protagonist Project
Like most working grassroots artists, I have depended upon the generosity, love and support of my audiences over the years in myriad ways- you have helped carve out space for me to travel, speak, learn, write and perform. My gratitude is boundless, truly. These past 3 1/2 years I have been pursuing a PhD in Political Theory and have been on the road a lot less. I am loving this particular journey but I sure have missed all of you. This is the first time I’m asking our community to come together in making an album and I so hope you’ll be on board!
The poems I have selected for the forthcoming album Protagonist constitute an assemblage of personal-political reflections on the past five years or so. Some of these pieces, like “Dear Diary” you may have heard at shows while others are brand-new. The point is that ALL but two of them are unrecorded, some not even written down, having been living a nice but very solitary life entirely inside my brain. I have recorded two at this point, “Women are Different” and “Dear 16 Year Old Me” (you’ll hear a snippet of the latter behind the video of me talking about this project). BUT I need YOUR help to finish recording and mixing the rest and sending them into post-production land! This entails paying other grassroots and freelance artists to play on and produce the tracks, help me design the inside of the album and make copies of Protagonist. I am also planning to do the lyric book version- as I have with my past albums (my serpentine poems just don’t fit in a CD booklet as handy as that would be– I’ve tried!). So.. I’m reaching out to all of the protagonists in my little corner of the world asking if we can make this project happen together in the next few months. I love these poems and I would love even more to release them into the world to share them with all of you. We have 60 days to raise the funds and then I can hit the studio!