Progress Up 'Til Now

This whole disc, titled "To Sit On the Sun and Eat Stars", initially came from the simple idea of escapism. The CD will be a loosely constructed concept album that will embrace that feeling of just wanting to leave everything behind when it becomes to much. The general story will be based around me - I get fed up with life, build myself a little spaceship and leave. I will elaborate more later on how I plan to execute the whole premise but for now that should suffice. And when I do pull it off, it won't appear to be as hokey as that brief synopsis makes it sound.

Anyways...

Overall I have probably created 25 to 30 full songs in the process of making this CD. I have also written rhyming storybook-ish semi-skits to work as story-clarifying pieces between some songs. I have whittled down from this bulk of stuff a remaining song base of between 15 and 18 songs with 8 semi-skits (with roughly 4 of those being a minute to a minute and a half in length and the other 4 being more like 15 to 30 seconds). At the moment (without the skits) the track list looks like this:


1. Make It Work**
2. We Are Not the Same**
3. Steve Nashville
4. The Fly*
5. Storm Warning
6. Get Away
7. G'Luck Heart
8. Believe in Me
9. Everything I Can
10. Jealous, Hardly
11. Meredith's Song
12. Heal the Wounds *
13. Heaven
14. Thank You
15. Rise Up

Possible:
Fuck the World
Shark in the Water**
H*

* = some part unfinished
** = unrecorded


One of the big problems that I am currently facing is that while I have created all the music (save for "Storm Warning" and the guitar parts on "Heaven") on my own using MIDI instruments, I am not fully satisfied with the final musical product. The key reason for this is one of the big problems with using MIDI instruments - they just sound too...MIDI. I don't really know who to talk to or try to recruit to help me take the next step into resolving this although perhaps I haven't been as proactive about this as I should. I just fear losing artistic control but I feel that at this point maybe giving a bit of that up will be worth finally finishing this disc that I have loved and been haunted by for so long.

So if anybody out there has any advise, suggestions, or other comments on how I should deal with this I'd love to hear your thoughts. Maybe I'm just talking to nobody out there at all and I'm just trying to focus my thoughts but I would like to think someone would respond...