Heat Stroke Incoming in Four Days!
Can you believe it? My new album, Heat Stroke, will hit the Internet for anyone and everyone to buy, stream, steal, or ignore in just four days! You can read my past posts about the recording of the album here. I’m still working on what I hope to be an elaborate, yet concise, retrospective about the album. I want to explain each song a little bit and how it fits into what I wanted Heat Stroke to be. I realize it’s probably futile to do that without sounding pretentious, but I’m doing my best with it. As for when I’ll be done with it and post it here, I’m not sure. Originally, I wanted to post it before Heat Stroke was released, but then I realized that would be weird. Then I thought maybe the release date would be good. That’s certainly a better option, but I think I’ll wait a week or so after release. That’s January 27th, if you forgot.
I haven’t talked much about what I’ve been doing these last couple of weeks. None of it is very interesting. But I made simple YouTube videos of all the songs and got those uploaded. They’re private at the moment. I’ll make them public next Tuesday. I’ve also been reaching out to a few websites to see if they’d like to review the album. My hope was that, if they agreed to do it, their review would be done and on their sites ahead of release date, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. In my defense, I did e-mail them weeks ago, so it’s not like I waited to pursue reviews. Plus, the album wasn’t technically ready until January 9th, I think. Perhaps I could have put the release date further off, in February or something. But considering my plan was to be completed with it in October, I didn’t want to delay it any longer than I had to.
Speaking of which, since the audio files were sent to the various outlets on or around January 12th, I’m not 100% sure Heat Stroke will be available on release day everywhere. I understand that it can take anywhere from a couple of days to a month for a service to get your album ready for purchase. I gave them about 3 weeks. Hopefully that’s long enough. As long as Amazon (who already has it, preorder here!), iTunes, and the big streaming services have it on release, I’ll be satisfied. It’ll definitely be available on Bandcamp and YouTube, since I’m in control of those avenues. I may put it up on Soundcloud as well. Whatever happens, I’ll put as many links I can wrangle up here on Tuesday.
I don’t know if the success of the digital version of the album will come into play or not, but I’m still considering getting a run of physical CDs printed up for Heat Stroke. At the very least, I’m sure I’ll get a few made just for myself. I’ve mentioned that a few times over the last month or so. No one has expressed any interest in one, but maybe once the digital version gets out there, there will be a little more attention on it. I don’t know.
What else? Next week I’ll probably be plugging my album wherever I can. I’ll try not to spam or anything, but I figure if Heat Stroke is going to get any attention, it should come next week, in the middle of winter. Like I said, you’ll be able to stream all the tracks on all the streaming services. You’ll be able to listen to it on YouTube. You’ll be able to buy it on iTunes and Amazon and Bandcamp. I’ll post the lyrics on release day too.
In closing, I do wonder if releasing the album during the summer would be a better idea given the themes on the album. Huh. I don’t know. Whatever. Stay tuned.