This blog is part 4 in an ongoing series. If you missed it, jump back to part 3 here.

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I was a little surprised when I hopped into the scheduling page to find that I wouldn’t be scheduling our first session. Instead it would just be a virtual meeting to discuss next steps. 

That part is all well and good, I figured, but I had to laugh when I saw the first meeting date was scheduled 3 weeks out and you would only be choosing a 7 minute block. 

It just felt like an odd amount of time to schedule a meeting like this. Why 7 minutes? Why not a solid 10 at least? Would 10 minutes even be enough? What do I know about any of this anyway? This was obviously a busy guy.

I admit, the time block rubbed me the wrong way. It reeked of self importance. “I can only give you 7 minutes.” Who does that?

I booked my time and used the 3 weeks to hum and haw over the songs I’d written, clean up some of them and solidify my own thoughts on which one(s) I’d prefer to proceed with at this time. 

I arrived early to the virtual meeting.

And once it got going, it was a little awkward.

I didn’t really know this guy yet and it’s harder to read people over a virtual call. He was quiet and first needed a few moments to wrap up whatever else he was doing before our time started. I was polite about it.

Then he got right down to business. There were no real pleasantries or any sort of quick comversation that suggested he was excited about getting started, he was pretty expressionless.

He reiterated the plan in a way that suggested he might not have remembered where we last left off, telling me we could either start a track from scratch or I could bring something in I’d already started. I reiterated that I had some songs ready to go and felt we could start there to see if he thought any of them were worth pursuing. Then he said he’d send out another scheduling link to book my first real session. We finished the call and I wondered why we needed this 7 minute call at all. No new information was shared and I now would have to wait for a new scheduling link. Would this one be pushed out another 3 weeks?

It was reminiscent of my time working in a corproate office, being pulled into nothing-meetings by nothing-bigheads just to check a nothing-box.

In the months that would follow, I’d often find myself leaving our interactions at least mildly confused like this, but I tried not to think much of it. Obviously he was busy given that he was scheduling out things as far as he was and being seemingly in the middle of other work at the time, but I wasn’t too concerned at this stage of things.

If we went ahead with the song I had in mind, I didn’t expect us to need many sessions to get it all done anyways. At this point, I’m reasonably confident in myself when it comes to recording sessions and felt with someone like this guy on the team it could only be more fluid. 

We were supposed to be a team… right?

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Next up in the series, read Part 5: The First Session.