Listening for the album
Tonight I'm just listening. The new songs exist now, which is its own kind of relief, and the job has shifted from making them to hearing how they sit next to each other. What opens. What closes. Where the energy drops and whether that drop is a mistake or a breath.
The frustrating part of this stage is that I hear things. A transition that lands wrong, a vocal that needs to come up, a track that wants to be two slots later. And then the song ends, the next one starts, and the note is gone. By the time I'm back at the desk I remember that there was something, not what it was.
Which is why I'm building a tool for it. I already had an app in the works for writers called Dead Air that reads a draft aloud and logs the spots where you flinch. Tonight it hit me that the same thing is exactly what a playlist needs: import the tracks, play them in order, and tap when something's off. Leave a voice note. Drop a marker on the timestamp, or on the gap between two songs, because the gap is where sequencing decisions actually live.
Same engine, different source. The name even gets more literal. On a draft, dead air is a metaphor. On an album it's the thing you're listening for.
More as the running order settles.