DJJD Music: DJJD Volume 2

Let’s go back to early 2004. After hours before I would go home, I would try and decompress from the daily mental strain by checking out websites, especially entertainment related. The internet was there but not as robust and sophisticated at it is today. There would be movie news sites, checking out the latest movie trailers.

It was three years since I created my first CD Album DJJD Volume 1. In that span of time, the whole Napster music file sharing controversy was fading away. Settlements eventually came between Napster and the music industry, agreeing that free music file sharing would be eliminated and a small fee would be required to download or stream a song. Despite winning the lawsuit, the music industry in the long run got the shaft in being able to control all distributed music. This would eventually start up the whole MP3 music explosion. And I discovered the first major application outside of Napster to frontier this music listening revolution.

One night I was recalling back to that January day of that album creation. I was just getting out of my depression, where I had nearly had no creative or artistic drive or motivation whatsoever. I decided to check out movie trailers that night, when I came across a new website for trailers – the official Apple website. Besides watching movie trailers using QuickTime, I started exploring the Apple site for the heck of it. Surfing this site, I discovered a new and safe application to install that dealt with music downloads and streaming. That application is called iTunes. I then installed it to check it out.

This application was amazing, allowing to preview and buy a vast variety of songs from their store for a buck a song (possibly seven dollars an album). I could save the files internally in my personal library, create my own playlist, and burn it on CD. Ding! Ding! Ding! I just found a goldmine and a huge opportunity to continue what I did three years ago – create new albums. Only this time the moral ambiguity of file sharing has been removed. Now I could stay after hours of work (at that time I did not have my own personal computer), and make more CD albums.

My creative and artistic motivation was back. I have the talent of logic and the skills essential for computer programing. But deep in my heart, I am an artist and a philosopher, and I desperately needed to express myself after dealing with three years of straight work, work, and more work. This was the opportunity to have a craft that would both satisfy my artistic passions and my technical background. I could not get the dream job of working at the film studio or be part of the special effects giant Industrial, Lights, and Magic. But this would be the next big thing.

This was the beginning of creating 30+ CD Albums in the span of five years. That beginning was DJJD Volume 2.

Concept and Theme of the Album

I did not have that rush of creative spontaneity like I did before, so consciously the thought of a concept album did not come to mind at this time. In hindsight there are various songs that expressed what I was feeling at that time. The iTunes application was still brand new technology, just barely exploring the system. There were some ideas that were floating around. I still had the desire to retrieve those songs from my parents 45 RPM vinyl record collection in the past. Tommy Roe’s Dizzy was one of them, which I already incorporated into DJJD Volume 1. The instrumental Classical Gas was left out from the previous album due to lack of space. So what a good place to start this album. Other places of inspiration would come from my good times in college – the Judson College years. There were also songs I enjoyed a lot when I was traveling for work as well as contemporary influences from my sister and (soon to be) brother-in-law.

I wanted to do something different than before, mainly adding harder rock tracks instead of my previous - albeit an awesome - album being a bit too soft. However, the same template and structure would be used, like I would for all future albums.

This album would be structured in the following manner. The first half would constitute more classic rock songs that I remembered in the past. The second half would contain more hard rock tracks (both classic and contemporary) with the last section with softer rock ballads and ending on a more serious note.

Concept and the Album Cover

DJJD Volume 2 did not have a distinct concept or them, so I had to think up of an album cover to represent it in a unique style. My late father had a Ventures record called Golden Greats, released in 1967. The album cover was orange in overall tone, with a beautiful sexy blond woman posing in a golden bikini. Then that album recalled for me another 1960s pop culture images of women in bikinis. Many of them would have their having their bodies painted and seen dancing (or posing), while having images projected on them. The sixties TV show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In comes to mind as well as the first three James Bond films: Dr. No., From Russia with Love and Goldfinger.

With that inspiration, I searched the Internet for any art images of projections on barely naked women, specifically where a guitar or another musical image was projected. There were not much at the time for variety, but did found something close to my linking. It was a projection of a Spanish guitar on a woman’s naked back.

At that time, I was not really impressed with that image. When I started remastering my album collection on my own personal computer in 2009, I had an opportunity to replace the album cover with a better picture. I could not find the original picture but found something similar to it. Since the picture had too much yellow and tan tones, I decided to adjust the ambient color to a more reddish-orange tint, thus fitting the overall look of the album cover. The back cover was from a secondary picture where the blond model had fire motifs painted on her back. The remastered versions looked much better than before.

DJJD Music

Thursday, June 6, 2013

DJJD Volume 2

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