So there’s this guy I follow on YouTube named Leo Moracchioli.  Despite having what at least to this writer appeared to be an aggressively Italian name, Leo is very much a Norwegian metal artist.  He has an incredible studio (Frogleap Studios) where he works and lives with his wife and daughter.  Leo’s got a band (appropriately enough, the Frogleap Band) and his wife plays bass in her own band.  So Leo’s ultimate goal is, as near as I can tell, to be a producer.  So he’s got this amazing studio and an immense amount of talent and drive.  What I admire/what inspires me the most about Leo is that every single week, on Friday, he releases a metal cover version of a song he has selected for that week.  He plays all the instruments (occasionally, he’ll feature guest musicians) and does all the vocals (again, with an occasional guest vocalist (typically for a female part)).   So every week, he’s playing, recording, and producing at least one complete cover song, fully produced, released for sale/digital download.  Which is quite impressive.  But he also films and edits a video for each of his songs.  Not sure if you’ve ever recorded a song, or even one instrument of a song, or filmed a music video, but each of these processes is time- and energy consuming, stressful and frustrating, and generally just difficult to pull off ever, let alone every single week.  This guy is married and has a young daughter, so I’ll assume his weekends are spent doing family shit.  Which means that Monday morning, he trudges into his studio, kicking of his crocs outside the front door, I assume having already decided what song he’s going to take on this week.  So if he hasn’t already arranged the song in his head, then he has to figure that out (dude isn’t replicating the tracks of the songs, which would be challenging in its own way, but actually doing original and evocative metal arrangements that pull certain elements out of the song and in many cases, are remarkable improvements on the original (his recent cover of House of Pain’s “Jump Around” comes to mind).  Then he has to record and simultaneously engineer all of the instrumental and vocal tracks, complete those, all the while dealing with the endless technical difficulties one is constantly encountering in a recording studio.  So that’s gotta take three days…so MTW.  Final mix (if it’s not done) Thursday morning, then shooting, editing, and syncing the video, finishing that night in time to upload everything (song files to iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play, video file to YouTube) by Friday morning.  Amazing.  Leo’s productivity and prolificity have been a huge inspiration to me and the way I approach my work, while also being very entertaining, musically.
Check him out here: https://www.youtube.com/user/leolego.

N.P.: “Bells & Circles” – Underworld, Iggy Pop

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