This is how it used to work. A CD would show up at the house, I'd slip it from its envelope and give it an initial listen. Most of the time, the music would tell me what I should say. Many times, there would be multiple avenues to investigate. Some of this might take a few days (or even weeks) to come together.

Recently...nothing. If I hear the music (read: If I can even manage to open the package), then it ends right about there. No stories, no interconnected facts, no interesting parallels to check out. Nothing.

"Writer's block" doesn't really describe this phenomenon. I'm sure that there are people out there who can keep up their creativity level during times of trauma, but I don't appear to be one of them. Honest attempts at forcing the issue would result in several paragraphs of nothing. The sentences barely held together. It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle that turned out to be all gray. At one point a little over a month ago, I decided to just leave it all on the table.

During all of the commotion (while the frighteningly large piles of review material continued to build...stacked on their edges, there are several feet of envelopes) I would get the occasional email, mostly from individual musicians: "Hi, I'm so and so....did you happen to receive my CD?...." Some of these I would let slip buy, mostly because I'd stopped responding to any emails at all. Once in a while I would say that, due to an illness in the family, I had gotten behind. I felt sort of bad unloading on a person like that.

Like yesterday, for instance. A while back I'd had some email with Tim Collins, who had played vibes on Sam Barsh's record, I Forgot What You Taught Me. He had his own album coming out and wondered if I'd be interested. Of course I was. The package was sent and ended up about 2 feet 7 inches from one end of my pile. So yesterday Tim sends me another email asking me if I'd ever received his CD.

This was the moment when I decided that the dust needed to be blown off the review table. The creative muscles had been allowed to shrivel: it was time to start flexing again. I told Tim what had been going on (and again felt very bad about it) and then went right up to the third floor and extracted Fade from the pile.

I was seriously afraid that I would hear nothing again.

Well, it's funny how things can turn out. After only a partial listen (in the car on the way to work), a huge grin spread across my face. This was THE perfect record for this moment. Featuring drummer Simon Lott and co-producer/bass phenom Charlie Hunter, Fade contains many of the elements that tend to light up my writer brain parts: piles of texture, surprising twists and turns, and wide-ranging dynamics, both sonic and stylistic. It's a ton of fun. Collins says that he "...wanted to make a record that would somehow reflect my love for Milt Jackson, The Police, and Bjork all at the same time." Yep, that pretty much nails it.

A full review of Fade will follow very soon. I just want to say that it's good to be back.

Thanks Tim.