Jiminy Cricket

Allow me to paint a picture. Logic is running and I have opened the file requiring tonight's effort and attention. Atlanta is a gargantuan heap of yellow pollen and all of outside is abuzz and aflutter with the earth coming back to life. Wood bees whizz and pop outside the window as baby birds chirp their requests for worms. Sound lovely?

Mostly it is, until I innocently string up a microphone to redo some subpar vocal tracks. All of the lively hubbub finds its way through the tangle of wires and into my headphones.

This will not do.

I decide to wait out the spring symphony by cooking up a chicken sandwich and curling up for a fifteen minute catnap. The sun heads toward the tree line and a sense of cooling calm begins to blanket the suburban landscape.

I Had just settled down for recording vocal matter,
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
The moon on the breast of carpets of pollen
Gave the lustre of mid-day to the spring that had fallen,
When, what to my wondering ears should arise,
But one thousand chirping crickets for me to despise.

The night was spent tweaking midi, mixing audio levels, and honing arrangement ideas. The new vocal tracks never came into existence. The winter had me competing with the borbarigmi of the furnace and water boiler, which seems tame compared to the nature's April incantation. This new challenge leaves me confounded; when am I to record anything?