Explone (shown mid-rehearsal above!) are headed into Avast! studio in a few weeks to start recording the follow-up to Dreamers/Lovers, released last June. So far it's shaping up to be a 6-song EP. Patrick has also been working with Thor Radford (who created the cool video for "St. Yesterday") on a new video for "Complicated." We have a mailing list if you're interested in all things Explone-y.
My unnamed, secret songwriting project may still be a secret but is no longer unnamed. Not only have we chosen a name, but secured the .com domain, Twitter, Gmail and Facebook usernames! What? Music? Oh, right. We're currently recording demos of the songs written so far. And we're going to play an incognito show at an undisclosed location in the next few weeks and see if anyone visibly cringes when they hear the songs. (And in true cart-before-horse fashion, I'm already dreaming up videos and t-shirt designs.)
Over the past 12 months, I've watched a handful of bands and solo artists attempt -- and fail -- to fund recording projects through online crowdfunding services like Kickstarter and RocketHub.
I've obviously got nothing against these sites or crowdfunding in general, but man, how disappointing and demoralizing to discover the hard way that maybe not many people are that into subsidizing your Thing.
In the case of Kickstarter, fall short and all the money is refunded. You get nothing. So there's no chance to say "wait, we'll just do a three-song EP instead!" Too late!
To be clear, I'm not blaming the services for failed projects. They're just tools. I'd rather see more tools that allow cool stuff to be created. And there's a lot of really great stuff being funded out there; recently I contributed to the Glif and the Helen Earth Band's tour van fundraiser.
I understand that having fans contribute to your cause is a great way to keep them excited and interested in your art.
But after seeing a few worthy bands fail to meet the crowdfunding bar, I have to wonder: whatever happened to just, you know, saving up your own money?
I've been working on a new music page that consolidates all my album tracks, demos, live tracks and other stuff into one big streaming pile o' tunes. There's a beta version up now for you to play with. It works best in Firefox and Safari -- there are a few layout bugs in IE8 which I intend to fix later.
My twin goals here are to 1) help new visitors better discover all the crazy stuff I have available, and 2) more quickly find the stuff they'd like the most. Plus: bigger buttons!
Your thoughts are of course appreciated. Is this useful? Am I on the right path? Gotta be a few opinionated webdev folks out there still reading this site...
Some technical notes after the jump, if you care. Otherwise, have at it!
The Technical Notes After The Jump
I built this using Scott Schiller's excellent SoundManager2 audio library which has an excellent JavaScript API and really does use HTML5 audio where the browser (ahem, Safari) supports it.
I used jQuery for the sorting panel controls. With the exception of the tiny Flash component used by SM2, everything else is done with good ol' HTML, CSS2/3 and JavaScript.
I'm writing this just a few hours after a show at the Tractor Tavern with Explone, so this might not actually be me but residual post-gig adrenaline in the driver's seat.
I want to note here that I'll very likely look back on 2010 as one of my most musically active years. Explone released a record; Kirby Krackle also released a record, wrote a commisioned song for Marvel and flew all over the place performing at comic-cons; I myself released two EPs and a bunch of instrumentals, and also began co-writing on that secret project that is still gaining momentum. I've been incredibly lucky to fall in with such a top-shelf crowd of artists and human beings.
Despite all that, something bugs me. I haven't played a live solo gig in ages. Since May 2009, in fact. And for better or for worse, I'm not feeling compelled to play live much anymore.
Let me unpack that: I like playing live. A lot. Explone and KK provide me plenty of stage time. What I'm liking less is all the overhead that goes along with gigging. The phone calls, the emails, the requisite begging and pleading to get a booking, and then the requisite begging and pleading to get people to put aside their Netflix and video games and child-rearing duties and come to the show.
Those parts have never been fun, but now there's a twist: I don't think I need it the way I used to. Maybe my ego doesn't require the validation of a live audience as it once did. Recently I've been much more content to simply write, record and release songs, and skip the playing out part.
After the release party for Save You From Yourself back in summer 2008, Dennis, Suzanne and I discussed the possibility of doing more shows together. But excitement for that idea dried up as time passed and I continued to Just. Not. Book. Shows. I still feel a bit terrible about that, but I think there was an additional factor in play: mentally, I had crossed a finish line. The record was done and had sold a bunch of copies. The show was a success and was now over.
I had set goals and achieved them. Yay! Now what? You can only spend so many Fridays crammed in a corner with a decrepit PA with missing cables, trying to be heard above the grind of the espresso machine, before you realize that maybe this isn't actually a path but an endless loop.
Ah, but live shows are where the money's at, right? Yes. I can tell you for certain that, in my experience, I have earned more cash as a musician performing live, than from selling CDs or MP3s. Orders-of-magnitude more. But still not enough to feel like I'm leaving money on the table when I'm not gigging.
I would "do music" even if there were no money in it. What I miss is the serendipity that comes from entertaining people.
I guess what I want to get across here is:
I miss playing
but really only the "playing" part, and
I don't know what to do about that
Overall, I guess it's a good thing, because I still get to make music more-or-less undistracted. But it's hard not to feel a little low and bewildered as I grapple with this idea that maybe I'm just not that guy anymore.
[audio:lbotal-mp3-instr/Scott Andrew - Love My Way (instrumental).mp3|no_twitter=1|no_fb=1]
It takes guts to take one of the most celebrated pieces of the post-punk/New Wave canon and render it as an oozy, golden-syrup acoustic pop ballad. Guts, I say. Well, that's what I said to myself, repeatedly, in the bathroom mirror, gripping the edges of the sink in terror, finally splashing some cold water on my face before marching resolutely to the laptop and clicking the Publish button.
FUN FACT! I reworked the drum machine intro at least three times because it kept sounding a little too much like "In The Air Tonight." The 80s: I kind of live there, in my head.
When I released the first mix of this song in late 2008, US licensing issues placed a restriction on the number of copies I could make available to listeners. Since then I've been trying out an online service called Limelight, which acts as a proxy between me and whomever holds the mechanical rights to the songs I want to cover. It's pretty much set-and-forget and I've been really impressed with the service so far. Anyway, the end result is it's much easier for me to offer near-infinite copies of cover songs, so long as I continue to foot the bill.
I am just so darn pleased to offer you these acoustic versions of tracks from Look Back On This And Laugh, collected in a handy digital EP format!
Um, it's probably inaccurate to call these "acoustic" since there are still plenty of electric guitars here. Some still have bass lines and drums left in, some have the drums replaced with congas, et al. And some tracks like "We Had A Good Thing" make no sense if you remove all the electric bits. Sort of a mixed bag. So think of them more as stripped-down alternate versions.
The download is a ZIP file of five 320K MP3s, and the whole thing is pay-what-you-like with a minimum of US$1 (that's one US dollar).
For the remix, I pushed the drums further forward and added some snappy reverb. I also had to create a track just for vocal reverb, because the bit of delay you can hear during the choruses was automated in Cakewalk and I didn't want to have to recreate it again in REAPER. So I ended up exporting just the delay as a separate track, plopping it onto a USB stick and importing it into the new mix.
I dig the guitarsenal sound I managed to get and I'm especially pleased with bass lines. I'm less happy with my vocals -- I was pretty stressed out when it was time to record them and there are a few spots where I wish I would have done just one more take. I generally need to be more choosy with my vocal takes. But now, nah.
Fun fact: the electric guitars in the first verse originally had a reggae arrangement that sounded a lot like Roxanne, but the Police. So much so, so scarily so, that I ditched them and replaced them with the echoey guitars you hear now.
I am just so darn pleased to offer you these acoustic versions of tracks from Look Back On This And Laugh, collected in a handy digital EP format!