Today, I probably won't get much songwriting done. I have a meeting with Tziporah, my partner in the Afro-World music venture "Namwaaka." We released our album 18 months ago (an awesome night for us) - but since it was our first album, we now know we made lots of mistakes. So, one of the 5 albums I'm aiming to release this year will be a re-release of that album.
Actually, we used to be called Platoon, but every time you do a search for Platoon, the first thing that pops up is the movie. In any case, you'd think that with my marketing background I would have used my brain to realise that Platoon does not say "Afro-Pop world music." "Namwaaka" is a Chichewa word (a local Malawi dialect) that means "years" or refers to time. It took Tziporah (I call her Flo) and me many years to get our first album together, partly because we weren't ready, and partly because we were reactive, hoping that a label would pick us up. I eventually saw the light and decided, thanks in large part to cool peeps like Bob Baker and Derek Sivers, to take my career into my own hands.
So, we are re-releasing our first album sans three tracks: two of the tracks will be transferred to my upcoming solo album of original music (the other song just doesn't work at all for us - we may decide to give it to another artist to do), and we will be adding three other tracks: Afrika (a new song we started working on in 2008), Thula (a song written by the late, very talented Joe Matsheka) and My Mother's Love (a song written by Flo, so that doesn't count for me).
Speaking of mothers, I just got off the phone with my mom, who lives 300 kilometres away (we were with her for Christmas and New Year), and she listened to my Christmas album last night - she said she really enjoyed it. Also, my friend Nan (who took copies of the album for her sisters in New Zealand) said it was played three times on Christmas Day (poor them). YAY! I have fans 15,000 kilometres away...
Anyway, that's me for today.
Days to go: 360.
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