Folklife was a hoot and we had a great audience. We debuted two new songs and solicited the crowd for opinions on having monkeys as part of our act. Jerin's idea, not mine. For serious. We'll have some follow-up stuff posted soon.
In the last month it was decided that both Kirby Krackle and Explone will be joining Kin to Stars in semi-abandoning album releases in favor of releasing singles throughout the year. Patrick had a great metaphor to explain why: "I want more times at bat."
I was really happy to hear this. For bands striving to find new fans, the concept of the "album cycle" has been dead and buried for at least a decade.
The baseball metaphor really is apt. With an album, you get one time at bat. One chance for significant attention. You're counting on that home run. If you swing and miss, that's ten songs' worth of effort down the drain. Contrast that with a band that consistently releases singles every few months. If one flops, so what? Move on to the next one and make it better. Infinite times at bat. There's no heartbreak from watching three years of work, time and money go ignored. You haven't bet the farm on that one shot.
Unless there is someone else footing the bill -- and therefore calling the shots for you -- there should be only one reason to release an album: your fans want it. Every other reason is probably the wrong reason. If you've got thousands of fans already willing to wait, that's awesome! But most bands don't, and it's easy to burn out trying to keep fans interested during those between-release dead zones.
Personally, I find releasing singles is way more fun and energizing. We're already beginning work on the next Kin to Stars single, surfing the wave from our last one, without the emotional overhead of boxes of unsold CDs and thousands of dollars of recording debt. It's a nice way to work. I can't wait to see it applied to the other bands I'm working with.
Two days ago, after a terrifying Seattle spring downpour that lasted about a half-hour, the sky cleared up and became this. As if to say: sorry, lost my cool there for a moment.
I'd like to thank sci-fi songwriter John Anealio and author Patrick Hester for having me on their Functional Nerds podcast to talk about home recording and potentially totally ruin the good thing they have going with my fevered stutterings about home recording gear, the importance of finishing the song first, and when to be nitpicky vs. when to release the darn thing.
Also, I wasn't kidding about the pure terror, gosh I wish I could just relax and toss insightful witticisms back and forth with practiced ease.
Here's some post-show errata and links to stuff mentioned in the episode:
REAPER recording software - since the last time I used REAPER, they've added a Mac OSX version, yay! Also, REAPER is "free" to mess around with but they ask for a $60 license fee if you plan to use it regularly. It's a ridiculously good deal.
There's also a bunch of stuff we didn't talk about, such as: headphone mixing vs. using monitors, "mastering" for earbuds, the challenge of recording in bedrooms, the George Lucas-y benefits of being able to retcon your own songs, etc. that probably would have been cool to cover but I probably would have talked for another two hours. But the takeaway, as Patrick mentions about halfway through, is this stuff is out there now, for any and all comers to try their hand at making recordings. So get to it!
All of the bands I play with still sell lots of CDs. These Kin to Stars samplers will be available at our Folklife Festival show on Saturday, May 26.
Truth be told, we had the actual discs made a few months back and planned to make our own DIY sleeves with rubber stamps and cardboard blanks from Stumptown. We made about 20 sleeves of, ahem, varying quality before giving up. Then a few weeks ago I got frustrated not having "proper" sleeves and just went ahead and designed the printed ones you see above.
And just to be clear: nobody complained about the cardboard-and-stamp sleeves. There's a certain precious charm that comes with the arts-and-crafts side of DIY. When I went to my first SXSW Music (before there was either an Interactive or Film) I was blown away at the creativity of dirt-poor musicians who mass-produced their own cassettes on 2-deck stereos, designing the inserts with clip art and glue sticks, decorating CD blanks with Crayola markers. But that was done out of necessity due to lack of funds and access to required machinery.
Musicians are still dirt-poor, but costs have come so far down since those days. What used to cost thousands now costs hundreds, and artists have more options than ever before. I didn't abandon the DIY sleeves because I disliked the DIY-ness of it all. I abandoned them because the average Instagram photo is the perfect size and quality for album art, and because a run of printed sleeves now costs less than our time is worth stamping and folding. And that is super-weird and awesome to comprehend. We've come a long way from those days standing in line at Kinko's.
Super-happy to get this one out the door as it seems to be a crowd favorite at shows. Jerin wrote the chorus and first verse years ago, and brought it to one of our songwriting sessions last spring where she and I worked up the rest of the tune. The guitar and drum arrangements were done by me, using the DM6Kit and Garageband's built-in amp modeling mojo.
I'm sure I don't have to tell y'all that sharing a song via a tweet, a "like", a "plus" or what-have-you is every bit as valuable as buying it these days. So please know that we appreciate your support no matter how you choose to express it. Which is a polite way of saying: you can haz piano pop? Yes, you can haz, and please haz it along to your piano pop-loving friends, too.
Lefsetz Letter » Blog Archive » You’ve Got To Be There For The Accident. Participation is mandatory. The next time some musician is bitching at you about how the internet and piracy is destroying everything, check their website (if they have one) and see how many gigs they're playing, the date of their last release, the number of fans in their fanclub.
HBO Has Only Itself To Blame For Record 'Game Of Thrones' Piracy - Forbes. And this more or less outlines why I'm agreement with The Oatmeal (NSFW) and not Andy Ihnatko. It's bad enough when a popular show like GoT isn't available, but we don't just watch anymore. We tweet, we blog, we share, we make funny Team Lanister! t-shirts and head-on-a-stake cake pops and we can't participate because there's only one way to legally experience the show. Scarcity ain't like it used to be.
So I was out in the front yard yesterday taking advantage of our early sunny weather to clean up the weed-choked planter by the front steps. I managed to grab ahold of some rooty, woody-stemmed thing and yank the contents of the planter out in a massive ball of roots and soil, and as I did this a single hornet came buzzing out.
There in the bottom of the empty planter was a hornet nest the size of a tennis ball. Lucky for me, the wayward hornet seemed to be the only tenant. It had found the drain hole at the bottom of the planter and decided to set up shop. As I went inside to get the wasp spray, I decided I was glad to find the nest now – otherwise we'd have hornets flying around our yard all summer and no clue where they came from.
I gave the paper nest a good soaking, and when no other hornets came out I tipped the planter into yard waste can. The nest rolled in and broke apart, revealing a honeycomb-like core. And nestled into the cells of the comb, in a tight little ring, were about eight totally gross hornet larvae.
My reaction was somewhere between ewww and cooool and as I leaned in for a closer look I realized that the way they were arranged reminded me of nothing so much as chambered bullets in a revolver. Which makes total sense because everyone knows hornets are nature's small arms fire.
When the head hornet came back I squirted her too so she couldn't shoot me with more hornets.
Hey, when I redesigned this site late last year I scrapped a lot of stuff that I'm just now getting around to putting back. I never intended to turn comments off permanently, I basically just gave up on the design. They're back on now, and eventually I'll get around to bringing the Demo Club stuff back too. I was having all kinds of weird mental/emotional issues about the number of links and other garbage littering my old design. Actually, maybe that was just "winter."
Turning off comments seems to be a thing and while I can respect the reasons some people have for doing so, I've never felt the action was very welcoming. I'm sure there are people out there with haters to deal with, and I suppose that the presence of haters indicates you're doing something interesting. If you've earned a sizeable readership you've earned the right to moderate the incoming praise and/or scorn.
There's just something off-putting about coming across an insightful blog that has commenting disabled, dispiriting when it includes a multi-point post outlining all the reasons they've turned off comments, and maybe a little graceless when the post goes on to state that people who wish to comment should start a blog of their own. A lot of this is done in the name of "raising the level of discourse" or whatever, with analogies involving living rooms and what should and should not be said in them.
If blogs are the living rooms of the web, there's a contingent out there still covering their furniture in plastic wrap and asking us not to use the good cloth napkins. There is also spam, and haters. So -- pull up the drawbridge and we'll converse from our towers via Trackback smoke signals? Is Trackback still a thing?
