I'm using a new camera because the old one -- a 2003 Christmas gift that could capture only three minutes of 320x480 footage at 15 frames per second -- died. The new camera can shoot in high definition, so it's a huge upgrade. I really like the results, and it's inspiring me to make more videos.

I also posted covers of Roberta Flack's "The Closer I Get to You" and Cocco's 「星に願いを」 to Myspace and Facebook as well. I've got a few other tracks posted on Metafilter Music as well.

I also went ahead and fixed the broken tracks on Amie Street. It was easier just to re-upload the album than wait for Amie Street support to do it themselves.

Back in June, CD Baby redesigned its site, improving the interface significantly and added a content upload section. It was too successful for its own good. I uploaded the files for Restraint back in July, and I set a future release date for Aug. 18. When the release date rolled around, nothing happened.

I sent an e-mail to CD Baby, and they haven't answered. Then I visited the site's Twitter feed and saw a whole lot of unhappy customers. Yesterday, I discovered CD Baby disabled the content upload section, citing an inability to turn around content as the reason.

I'm giving CD Baby some slack, and I'll try to reach them again later. I wonder how much testing went into this relaunch, because it seems to have been riddled with hiccups from the outset.

I don't know what happened -- I put those files up a long time ago. Amie Street was pretty reliable for the Imprint and 「風の歌を聴け」 releases, but there's a whole lot of clusterfuck going on over there as well.

Bandcamp, thankfully, has not managed to screw me. I uploaded the album a while back, and now I've made it available.

I made a decision a few weeks back to delay the next few releases in the Work Release Program, since money is really tight at the moment. The fact this release has gone so poorly makes me think the decision is serendipitous.

I'll be traveling to Japan in November, and I'll consider starting up the Work Release Program again next year. Perhaps by then, CD Baby will get back on its feet. Right now, it's a total mess.

The lyrics for "Restraint" are somewhat autobiographical. I'm far too reserved, and I could probably do well to exercise less restraint every so often.

Unlike most of the songs on this album, "Strange Arrangement" was pretty much written back in 1999, lyrics included. It just needed to be recorded. I knew I wanted it sparse, so organ and strings, upright bass and light percussion were as far as I went.

Then I re-established contact with the friend on which these songs are based. So "Letter II" is only partially fiction. (You'd have to ask him if he was thinking what was in the lyrics.)

This life imitating art thing is kind of like the chicken and the egg.

Like its brethren, the middle section of "Reticence" quotes the title track of the album, but it's something of a hidden reference since "Reticence" appears before "Restraint" in sequence.

(I'm not sure why I was so fond of titling songs beginning with the letter "R".)

I think this song is the only one where I use a lot of diminished sevenths. It's a very classical technique, which I think is why I like the string parts so much. It's not a technique I've yet used elsewhere.

I was banging out the chord progressions of both songs, thinking they were separate entities, but I realized they were too similiar in nature. So I decided they would share the same chorus and segue into each other.

I felt too lazy to come up with a middle section for "Emancipation" so I quoted "The One to Make You Whole". It's a gimmick I learned from Tears for Fears, who would often inject a quote of one song into another, not necessarily from the same album.

Even the lyrics are pretty generic. Oh, not one but two break-up songs! At the very least, I had to write from the perspective of each character in the relationship. No, I can't say I'm speaking from much experience. I also quoted other songs in the lyrics -- "Melt", "All the Times I Remember".

For a long time, I never really warmed up to "Emancipation". It just seemed to miss something or other. I fiddled with the arrangements over and over, and I re-recorded the main vocals a number of times. When I finally added background vocals, the song made more sense, and I like it a lot more now.

When I played minor chords over that interval, I discovered the secret of Martin L. Gore's success. As such, there was no way I was going to use that interval without paying homage to Depeche Mode. I even tried to make the lyrics very Music for the Masses. The drum fill is pretty much a quotation of New Order's "True Faith".

I'm not much of a recreational substance user. Pakalolo is the furthest I've gone. So these lyrics aren't very genuine.

The first draft of the lyrics tried to deal with writing lyrics the same way "The One to Make You Whole" dealt with writing music. It didn't really work with the melody. So for a second draft, I kept the chorus but turned the verses into a love song. It's taken me a while to warm up to this second draft, but it sounds better with the melody.

I sketched out two ideas back in 1999 and fooled myself into thinking I needed something for a chorus and a middle section. So the ideas stayed in my notebook untouched for five years before I came back to them. At that point, I realized I didn't need much else, just one more idea, and the song was finished.

I wish I knew that back in 1999.

As usual, I set the first phrase of the melody to the first line of lyrics I felt fit. Then I let that line dictate everything else. By the end, I had a song about memories and histories.

The instrumentation of this song is sparse, but the tempo is pretty quick. So I don't really consider it a slow song. Quiet, maybe, but not slow.

No, it's not a groundbreaking technique, but it's enough to lend a certain amount of lift to the song. It doesn't feel quite right, but there's nothing specifically dissonant about it. It's also the only thing I've done (so far) with a marching rhythm. It strikes me as kind of Celtic.

The lyrics are incredibly stream of conscious. This song is already weird musically, so the words should follow suit. At first, I thought they were humorous, but upon closer inspection, they're pretty dark.

This song took a lot of tweaking to get right. I experimented with a bunch of melodies before I settled on the one eventually used, which necessitated a transposition in order for me to sing it. The song was originally in C minor, but A minor gives a bit more weight to the bass.

The syncopation in the rhythm section pretty much locked in the rest of the song. I tried to give the guitars a bit more independence, but that rhythm is way too strong.

As for the lyrics, well, replace the word "soul" with "seed", and you should get the drift. I was at a loss for anything else to write, and I don't usually make a habit of writing so suggestively.

I didn't realize I'd be making two versions of this song till I wrote the lyrics. This first letter is written from the perspective of someone who let a friendship fall by the way side. As I worked on more songs for the album, I thought, "What if this letter became a correspondence?"

I originally planned a number of letters throughout the album, but I could only squeeze in a single reply (with which I'll deal in a later entry.)

In the case of "Without Nothing", I wanted to hint at a Phyrgian mode, using C-minor and D-flat major chords. The melody, though, is entirely diatonic, so the song is pretty much in the key of A-flat, starting on the vi chord.

Yes, I'm terribly analytical when it comes to writing music.

The opening piano riff was the first thing I sketched back in 1998, and it pretty remained as such till 2005. Back then, I didn't really know what to do with it. Things started to fall into place as I built tracks around the chord progression, and I realized the song was further along than I thought. That's happened a lot with the tracks on this album.

I dragged my feet with the lyrics. The bulk of the lyrics on Restraint were done in marathon sessions, and I usually took the first thing I wrote down. How well these words fit the music is anyone's guess. I've just gotten accustomed to hearing them with the music.

I can't say exactly what this song is about because I wasn't consciously going for a particular theme. I just wrote the first line -- as usual -- then let the other lines follow. So read into it what you like.

My version of the progression is I-v-bVI-IV, or with in an approximate key of D major, D-Am-Bb-G. The notes F and B vacillate between its sharp and flat respectively, and the melody reflects this subtle instability. It also makes it a damn hard melody to sing.

I recorded numerous takes of this vocal, and every one of them had their problems. I'm not completely satisfied with the take I eventually used, which is not so great when I consider the song one of the few singles on the album. I really need to start collaborating with musicians better than I.

I sketched this song out in early 1999, at a time I wasn't doing much songwriting, and I was really missing it. I threw together the melody and the harmonic rhythm fairly quickly, and the lyrics poured out. It's a song about songwriting or perhaps more generally, the creative impulse. But if you want to hear it as a love song, that's OK as well.