"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." — Jack London

Facebook Fanpage: www.facebook.com/pages/Rick-Birmingham-Music/109931545751786

I HAD to make a record for February Album Writing Month - fawm.org . I never expected this to come out like it did. All I knew going in was that I would write and record 14 songs by the end of the month. In fact, that is one of the points of FAWM. Nothing was pre-written before February at all. No old riffs were used. No lyrics were written beforehand. Not a single chord or rhythm was chosen.

The only thing I allowed myself to consider was the subject matter of the record. Originally I thought I would write some post-apocalyptic love songs for Galaxy News Radio. GNR is a fictional radio station that exists inside the game Fallout3, a gritty and unhappy game full of slavers, zombies, radio-active mutant bears and scavenging for food. In the game you get to listen to GNR after you help fix the antenna as part of a quest and I thought, "Hey! Threedog needs more tracks to play!"

However, creativity is a running brook and for mine it was the spring thaw. This stream jumped it's banks quickly and repeatedly. Genre restrictions? Pffff. Subject matter? Pffff. Maintaining consistency throughout the process? Pffff. -Although I hear it actually holds together. I can't tell, I'm still "inside" of it and unable to be objective.

Some of the instrumentation, subject matter and style choices were chosen to fulfill requests made by fans and friends. It was a pleasure to do so. It was also fully enjoyable to have other musicians join me for some collaboration on a few tracks.

By the end I believe I spent an average of maybe seven hours on each track. That includes writing it, recording it, mixing it, making artwork for it and uploading it here. That being the case, I'm pretty happy with it!