UPDATE!!!!!!!! 12/7/12
Because I only received enough orders to warrant the purchase of ten CDs I've decided to go a similar route as I did with my previous album, Blanket Arms, but instead of the album coming in one type of package design each copy of Niece will be completely different. The CD and the inserts will be the same (maybe???) but the album cover will be different for each EP. It's just something that I thought might be fun for the eleven of us.

ABOUT THE PRE-ORDER
I've gone over the numbers (read: using the calculator on my phone and taking a lot of notes) I think the best/easiest way to go about releasing my new EP would be to take pre-orders and if I get up to 25 or so then I'll go ahead and print everything up and mail them out to those who purchased the album and that will be that. The amount of money brought in and my art degree will determine the packaging. For instance, if there are 25 pre orders then the packaging will be made with what the amount of money that those orders bring in (cd & wallet). The same works if there are 5 (mega hand made) or 300 (that's vinyl money, baby). Although if there are only 5 pre orders I'll refund everyone's money and you can buy six one dollar tacos. Or maybe if 1 person sends me a million dollars I'll go ahead and make a nice album for them and then buy everyone dinner. Yes. If you give me a million dollars I will fly you to Austin (unless you live in Austin), take you out for dinner and then we can watch a movie on Netflix of YOUR choice, probably Torque or something like that.

I thought about making a kickstarter and trying to raise the money to release these songs but after I went on a short run and thought about all of the cons that would come from starting a fundraiser like that I just decided to release the album this way. I think it's going to be better and less of a hassle for everyone.

If you decide to make a pre-order I'll keep you up to date on the status of the album and let you know what I'm up to with your money. Maybe I'll press/mail an album and be able to take some pictures of my cat eating the left over money (if there is left over money, if not then I can't do the cat thing).

ABOUT THE ALBUM
Some of these songs were meant to go together and some were not, between the second and third song there is almost a year and a half difference.
Three of these songs were recorded almost immediately after I released Blanket Arms thus the similarities abound. In all honesty I should have waited to release BA until these songs had fallen out of my head but I didn't so now here they are. One song was recorded around Halloween 2011 and I posted it and then never did anything with it because I am an idiot. I essentially baked a delicious chocolate pecan pie, set it out on the window sill to cool and never checked on it again. The two other songs on this album are essentially disparate pieces of an album that I ended up scrapping at the beginning of this year because it was directionless in the worst way possible. I think I posted D-VON on tumblr and promptly forgot about Outer Heaven for some reason. Maybe it was psychosomatic. The since trashed album is an epic sprawl of boredom that the seven minutes of OH only scratches the surface of.

On this small baby on the doorstep of an album there are sounds that I was in love with that I don't care to work with anymore but instead of trashing them and trying my hardest to never think about them again I'm listening with new ears, these are nice sounds that I'll probably come back to later.
At the moment I'm in the process of making something new for everyone to hear and while I'd love to disappear for a couple of weeks and finish a new album I can't right now so it's coming together in a similar fashion as Niece but I'm trying not to let anything get lost like I did last year (and maybe the back quarter of 2011). There's a distinct possibility that in a year I'll be posting something very similar and that would be fine with me but hopefully it'll be better version of me presenting a better version of what I've been working on. I suppose that's all anyone tries to do anyway.

But I love these songs and I want people to be able to listen to them whenever they please.

I felt off my game in 2012, maybe it was the heat or maybe I was just emotionally and artistically tapped out (he says, looking at his 2012 music folder and laughing at all of the half finished songs). I travelled across the East Coast for the first quarter of the the year and tried to avoid some very personal things that were happening back in Texas. The death of my Grandfather at the onset of January is something that I still haven't sat down and thought about for more than ten minutes at a time (and do you know how much I've sat down this year?) and then the dissolution of one side of my family (unrelated to my Grandfather) is something that I've completely avoided. Maybe that's what this year was to me, I avoided a lot of things. Mixing these songs has felt cathartic in a way that I can't explain, the best that I can do is to say that it's akin to speaking to your younger self might be like. In this case I'm about a year older and saying "I have no idea what to say other than you need to turn down the master volume on that reverb swell because it's peaking and it sounds bad".
Over this last year there have been a lot of friends that have completely dropped off of my radar (or maybe I dropped off of theirs) and it's painful to lose people that I really loved, that I thought that I shared a common bond with. But losing those friends and loved ones has reminded me why I started recording as RW in the first place. This is just me figuring things out and then screaming "HEY I FEEL BETTER!" at the Internet. Hopefully you have something that allows you to do that too. Or maybe you're a well adjusted human being who knows how to navigate life and don't need to spill your guts constantly. Either way I hope you like a thing that I've done. If you don't, I'm sorry. I can't stop.

Jacob Shelton
October 11, 2012