After doing 71 covers on The Smiths Project last year, I was ready to work on original music. These songs were created in a similar recording style to The Smiths Project, with layers of vocals making up all instrumentation including drum beats, strings, synths, choirs, etc. but this time, with the addition of piano samples on a few songs and, in one case, a drum machine and bells. That's it. These layered-vocal tracks take months to piece together and edit into arrangements. The album took about a year and a half to complete. Patchwork Life also has a bonus track featuring the vocals of James Roday, the star of Psych on USA Network. The song, a cover of Ideas As Opiates, was created as a birthday present for their mutual friend Curt Smith of Tears For Fears. The collaboration that took place via email over several months before James came to San Jose to record his vocals. The song was recorded by Grammy Award winning a cappella recording engineer Bill Hare. Album Title I called the album Patchwork Life because of the many distinct elements of my life that have come together to make up who I am- and make the music what it is. Growing up, I had a quilt on my bed that my grandmother made from my mother's old 70s clothes. Each square was so completely different, bold, and colorful. Nothing matched, yet the over all effect was cohesive and deeply personal. The quilt mirrors my musical attempt to honor the many aspects and extreme differences of my life- real vs.online, acoustic voice vs. digital editing, motherhood vs. music dreams, sleep vs. finishing an album... to take all these elements and use what ever is around me to create something new. Artwork The artwork represents what I see when working on music every day: waveforms. Since my music is made up of acoustic voices stitched together digitally, I spoke each song title into ProTools, took snapshots of the waveforms and then embroidered them onto fabric. The album art consists of an embroidered physical representation of my voice for each of the 11 original song titles as well as the album title.