• Notes on Cerebellum Blues Playlists One and Two: what’s with the title.

Welcome to my series of posts about how I got into music and songwriting and the events that ultimately led to the 2012 release of my first album. Here are the posts, so far:  

1. a little bit of blood, lots of sweat, a few tears (the launch!)

If you read anything that strikes a chord please let me know in the comments section or via email. As always, thank you for reading.

Before I get into posting about the whole recording process, the songs and more, I want to clarify why the album is called what it’s called and why there’s no band name, not even The Jeff Shattuck Band.

Here’s the scoop: I was talking to my wife, Catherine, about my what to call my album and what my band name should be, and she reminded me that there was no band, would not be one, I did not sing the songs, etc, so why try to pass myself off as something I’m not? “You should think of it as a songwriter’s portfolio,” she told me. Ultimately, I agreed with her but I really didn’t want to go with anything so boring as Jeff Shattuck’s Songs, so... what to do?

After much gnashing of neurons and many an additional wandering discussion with Catherine, with myself, with the universe, I finally settled on a way to do it: I opted to think of my musical endeavors as a project, which I call Cerebellum Blues, and over time I will release playlists, which will be collections of my songs grouped by mixtape principles. On this first album, I think of Playlist One as a mellow mixtape and Playlist Two as a mixtape that rocks a bit harder. I like this approach because another factor I was wrestling was the presence of so many lead singers on the the album. By calling each release a playlist, my hope is that I set the expectation for variety. Makes sense? Hope so.

Okay, onto the posts about how the album came into being. Next up: “beginnings”.