🎶December’s Monthly Notes🎶 – aka 2023’s Monthly Notes

Whew! That’s 2023 done…

Just checked my last Monthly Notes post and it was from July in Greece…I’ve been slack, or maybe I should say, otherwise occupied outside of things musical.

2023 was not a bad year musically with plenty of live gig opportunities along the way. The photo montage below gives a sense of all that fun. The 2 disappointments were not getting to do my solo Playa play at Burning Man (live set played out in the desert at sunset on the last Friday) due to a little bit of rain, and not getting over to Seoul, Korea for my frequent flier renegade tour (more on that later).

I hit many of my targets for the year with live shows and also keeping up my Release A Week (R.A.W.) weekly releases of ‘finished’ tracks to Bandcamp (the final few will be done in the 1st week of 2024 after a live gig opportunity scuppered my plans to finish the last few days). R.A.W. 2024 is kicking off from next week!

The one illusive goal for 2023 has been the completing of my first Steve Pottz full length album – Alive (working title). I have all the tracks largely finished and am in the ‘tweak to prepare for mix/master engineer’ stage (my worst!). The album consists of half the tracks from the last 10 years of producing and the other half from the last 2 years or so, all of which I have been fully road testing in my live shows. The aim of the album is to capture the essence of my live gigs in a studio album….tricky? Yup! So after missing my 1 July deadline for release, and then my ‘end of year’ deadline, I am once more needing to set a completion goal. And that is ~ 1 July 2024 for an albums release party in Sydney…watch this space (AGAIN!).

Other than all things musical, this last year was someone framed up with my prostate cancer diagnosis, treatment (surgery), and now recovery (all is going well). Didn’t really have that in the 2023 music program and it didn’t help the goal hitting process, but it certainly does hone one’s attention on the key things that matter in life. 2024 is gonna be full on, I am projecting. Thanks to all those who contributed to my Movember fund raising campaign, together we raised $ 2,845 ! Channelling my inner 80’s ski dude below:

So that’s the quick recap of the crazy year that was 2023, some ideas of what’s coming in 2024 included. More to follow in future posts.

Happy New Year!