Another Rainy Country-Tuesday

I read a review on Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s earlier today that described them as, “making depression danceable.”

And it got me thinking… I know people get seasonal depression during the winter, but sometimes I feel like I’ve got that with the spring. I’m a winter guy. Winter means snow and snowboarding and comfortable temperatures and low humidity and feeling accomplished when I leave work and it’s dark. Spring means awkward temperatures and humidity and torrential downpours of cold rain and driving into the sun in the morning and driving into the sun at night. And on an especially rainy country-Tuesday, it's even worse.

But far more than any perceived seasonal depression is this idea that music can be so emotive as to make you want to dance while depressed. Or, perhaps, another band/song could make you want to cry while happy.

Music facilitates complex emotions that don’t make sense out of the context of music.

And that’s why it’s so important; it makes us feel these emotions that society tries to obfuscate.

With the example of Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s, you’ve got this band that you can hear hitting rock bottom. They make you desperate for them. You want to help them, but you don’t want them to stop. They make you dismally reflective, but give you that urge to move your feet. One moment you want to belt out lyrics along with them, but the next you are soaking it all in and absorbed in the music.

And you can’t escape those feelings. They set their hook and lure you captive, sending shivers down your spine. And maybe it’s that you want to be there, in that place, or maybe it’s that you can’t will yourself away. It’s when the music is taking hold. Let it in.

 

P.S. I just discovered that their next album is out on April 22… Preorder it.

Wu-Tang Clan and Art

I can listen to the radio at work or wherever I am (although, outside of being forced to listen to the radio, I avoid it), and it hardly ever registers as art. There are varied sounds, ranging from the abhorrent twang of Country Tuesday to the retro vibes of Classic Rock Thursday. The is a span of genres and time that covers a large portion of western pop culture, except I can’t ever recall a time when I looked at all and thought art.

Now that isn’t to say that I don’t see music as art. Some Trevor Gordon Hall? You can’t deny the artistry in that. You can’t deny the talent and the intention behind every note. You can’t deny a mewithoutYou lyric. You can’t deny art in so much of what is not mainstream.

But within the mainstream, we have been conditioned to not think of it as art. Music isn’t valued as art or seen as some commodity; it’s valued as background, a notch above the hum of the AC unit in your office building. And so we have grown to be a culture that precipitously undervalues music. While paintings and sculptures are being auctioned off for thousands upon thousands of dollars, music is streamed for free. It has segued from being viewed as art to being viewed as a right.

And maybe that’s because of the implications of art. Art, in physical form, is so often viewed as some hoity-toity pastime, where the rich can wave around their wealth while seeking some greater existential enlightenment. Physical media has physical value. Whereas music can’t be seen or felt; it has no mass or color.

The idea of owning sound waves, or that which produces them, seems asinine when sound is all around us. The market has been flooded. People will [sometimes] pay for live performances, but they rarely see the value in paying for something nice to listen to. And, realistically, it makes sense when everything in music is as easily reproduced as it is. That’s the difference between physical art and music – repeatability and accessibility. For my first album, Deconstructing the Temporal Lobe, I had 1000 copies made. The difference in price between 500 and 1000 was something like $200. And if you want it now, you can stream it through Spotify right on your phone. Producing and reproducing music has transitioned to something so easy that everyone who wants in can be in.

Enter Wu-Tang Clan.

Read the article below:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2014/03/26/why-wu-tang-will-release-just-one-copy-of-its-secret-album/

They are making one single copy of their new album, Once Upon A Time In Shaolin. Amidst a time when an amateur can make 1000 copies (or even 100,000!) for relatively cheap, they’re making this as exclusive as possible. And they’re wrapping it in a silver and nickel hand-engraved box; a piece of art in and of itself. This isn’t another “collectors box set” where you are one of 10,000 lucky fans to own a cheaply made tin and a few relatively rare CDs; there is literally only ONE.

And it’s traveling around to art galleries, as an exhibit.

This won’t be music that is there for ambiance in the gallery. This won’t be music that is there to compliment a reception. It is there as an exhibit, in the foreground of the gallery.

And in glorified listening parties, this will be played and listened to. Very intentionally. Everything about this is intentional. If you want to be a part of this, the action has to be intentional.

Then the single copy, in the one-off engraved box, will be sold. My hope would be that it would go to a private collector or to some museum to either be reproduced and released for free or left as a listening party only exclusive. I’d like to see it not immediately flipped to make profit, like if a big company would buy it.

Yes, it makes it exclusive. I’m sure that will upset some people who are used to being part of the crowd. But, realistically, is having access to anyone’s musical catalog a right? If it is, where did the right come from; at what point in history did things change? Because music used to be a commodity. There was mystique behind a new release.

You weren’t just a fan of a song; you were a fan of an artist. And that’s what Wu-Tang is doing. And I’m not even a fan. I just find it so refreshing and potentially revitalizing for a music industry that has forgotten what art is.

This is creative; this is innovative; this is visionary. And this is art.

Reading to Improve Musical Writing?

I recently got a Kindle. A Kindle Paperwhite, actually. It was a gift from my wife, Kelly. I think for the most part I have always enjoyed reading. But books take up a bunch of room once you get a bunch, and it’s just a hassle to figure out lighting if you’re lying in bed or something like that. So I just haven’t read. In years. Instead, I’ve waited to get a Kindle.

And it’s worked. I’ve read 3 books so far. The last time I read a single book for pleasure was in the summer of 2009. That’s a long time ago. And in the span of two weeks, I just read 3. Granted, over that time I traveled to Utah and Vermont, but that’s still pretty impressive for someone who doesn’t often read.

Actually, though, to say that I didn’t read or don’t read isn’t entirely accurate. Because I read music-related articles and current events all the time; just nothing in book form; nothing conceived from creativity. Opinion articles and dissemination of facts is so much different from a fictitious novel.

So often we lack that creative plug. Look around society. Unless you seek out art, all of the media pushed on us is watered down garbage. Books were replaced by TV as a leisure activity a long time ago, but now we’re inundated with reality shows, mostly devoid of creativity. A handful of movies and tv shows have some merit, but the majority is mindless.

Which can also be said of music. We’ve embraced the quick buck and the easy pleasure. The idea that something can be thought provoking has been watered down from something that once consumed your conscious to something that makes you raise an eyebrow, but move on.

And as all of this happens, it only seeks to perpetuate itself. We aren’t inspiring people to be inspiring. We inspire people to become rich or to be famous. Those qualities are soulless and empty. The goal is no longer to be a great musician, but a rich musician. And this focus yields crappy music.

But when you get back to where you mind can roam free, there’s this enlightenment. You get lost in the book or lost in the music. You end up using parts of your brain that the rest of society has turned off.

And when you surround yourself with this, you can finally feel inspired.

Maybe it’s just correlation, but I’ve had a bit of a dry spell musically for a couple months. As an artist at the stage of my career that I’m at, it’s easy to see a show like B-Sides as the end game and to not know where to go from there. That’s about where I was at. But after delving into some good books, I feel like my creative juices have been rejuvenated. Now I don’t think that I’ll be writing any songs about the Hunger Games or anything like that, but the part of my brain that creates got moving again; forced from its sedentary lull.

Now this isn’t a call to read. I plan on continuing to read. But it is a call to surround yourself with opportunities to be creative. I’ve often times tried to force myself from a dry spell by listening to more good music or getting to more shows, thinking that that was the only solution. But if you want your music to speak to people, you need to know how to tell a story and a good book may be one of the better alternatives.

Perception: The Color IQ Test

Perception. It’s how we relate to the world. What we sense is how we understand our environment. Ultimately, our memories are shaped by what we perceive. One could argue that our entire being is just an I/O device of perception. I’d argue that we all have souls and are more than that, but that strays from the direction I’d like to take this.

So we all have these inputs: ears, eyes, tongues, and all the other stuff like that. But we only know what we perceive. Something that looks bright, sounds loud, or smells sweet to me is a perception that I can use to relate with others, but can never use to understand from another perspective. And we often times don’t think of things like this unless there is a known “disability” that we are trying to understand or overcome. For instance, I have friends who are partially color blind. I can comprehend that they see blue and green as the same color, but even still, that doesn’t change my perspective of what blue and green are.

There’s this test that I took the other day that got me thinking about this. It’s a color IQ test. Basically, there are four color continuums with starting and ending color tiles and you have to put other color tiles in order between the two. With a score of 0 being “perfect” and 99 being bad, I scored a 4, considerably lower than I anticipated. My issues were all in the blue region. While this doesn’t help us to be able to perceive what others do, it attempts to quantifiably relate my perception of color to another’s. And for the engineer in me, that’s an important first step; being able to quantify a deviation in perception, at the very least, acknowledges the differences, and at best, can give you an idea of how what you perceive relates to that of others.

We have vision tests and corrective procedures that also relate to eye sight. There, however, it is much easier to get everyone to a baseline of 20/20. It may be a bit easier to understand someone’s blurry vision than their colorblindness as simulating this is easier and makes more sense.

But what of our other senses? And mainly, I’m talking about sound and our ability to understand and decode waves of pressurized air.

We can test frequency ranges. They test both frequency and volume with most standard hearing tests. It’s known that, as you age, you lose higher frequencies. Have you ever heard a high-pitch sound (maybe a tv on in a room) that drove you crazy, but no one else could hear it and you couldn’t understand why? It doesn’t initially make sense to us as to how something so obnoxious could go unnoticed, yet clearly the others in the room lack your perception and can, therefore, not relate.

And then some people start to have all frequencies go, which, to my understanding, is more like truncating the amplitude than using a rolling filter; it’s more about volume than frequency. It’s easier to understand volume than pitch, in the same way that it is easier to understand poor eyesight than colorblindness, so I think, in general, this is a pretty easy concept to pick up on.

So, just like the color IQ test, we can have similar aural IQ test.

But the problem is that the connection to actual art is nearly non-existent. Because art is subjective. There is no IQ test for it. Dissonance and disorder can be beautiful and interesting, while melody can be stagnant and boring. In the same way, modern art can be intriguing while still life can be ordinary. There are no rules. Even guidelines are useless.

And this sort of thing drives someone like me crazy. The objectivity of opinion will always fall inferior to fact, and the fact is that there aren’t constants or magical formulas that make one piece of art good, while another bad.

So even if you can’t see the color blue or purple, or even if you can’t hear the frequency of the cymbals or of the bass, your ability to perceive art as good or bad doesn’t ever change. Because art is subjective. That’s how people can make “art” out of dead animals or Lou Reed can make an album of guitar feedback and still have the piece adorned with the label: “art.”

And we can argue properties. We can argue complexity and depth. We can argue tone. And these are all things we can try to put quantitative values to. That are ultimately meaningless… Because you can’t ever say x + y + z = art. It’s about perception. Except, unlike colorblindness or frequency hearing loss, you can’t ever quantify enough in order to adequately perceive as another perceives.

And I'll leave you with some Lou Reed.

Square

I jumped on the smartphone bandwagon a few months ago; it was either June or July. I know, I’m a few years late to the race, but I don’t feel like I missed too much. I held onto the old resistive type touchscreen and the physical keyboard buttons; they worked much better with guitar nails. And, of the new phone options, very few had those nail-friendly screens or buttons… Eventually, though, I was several years overdue for a new phone and the old phones I was using were dying on me left and right (mostly due to old age, not misuse or neglect).

But I wasn’t about to pay for a phone with comparable functionality to its predecessors, roping me into a 2 year contract. It was time to enter the smartphone era.

So I tried a few out and opted for the HTC One. I thought about jumping in with Apple, but the screen wasn’t big enough for me to text with the guitar nails. Seriously, if you’ve got ‘em grown out, you need more room. And several of the phones I burned through prior to this were Samsung, housed in a cheap plastic case, so I was turned off to that (If you make a high-end phone, don’t house it in cheap plastic!). The HTC it was.

But I’m not here to pitch you a phone. It’s a phone; I’m happy that I can talk, text, and get on facebook and craigslist. I’d be just as happy with an iphone or the latest Galaxy or even a Nokia. It’s a phone.

And mostly, I’d be happy with a phone that didn’t do the internet, too. That is still not synonymous with phone, for me at least.

But… what I would miss, and what pushed me towards the smartphone, is the era of the smartphone credit card swiper.

I first heard of these probably about 2 years ago, in a Lefsetz post. It was back when the Square Card was pretty much the only option. Before it was in stores, you could email them and they would send you a Square Card reader for FREE! I almost emailed them just so I would have it for whenever I would make the smartphone jump.

Instead, I waited. For both; the smartphone came a few years later, followed shortly thereafter by the Square Card. And I had to pay $10 at Target, but Square Card credits you $10 with a card you get. And you can still just email them through their app in order to get a free one, but I didn’t know that until after I made the purchase.

And at this point in the game, it’s not just Square Card. There are 3 or 4 other options: intuit, paypal, payanywhere, and probably a few others I’m forgetting. Portable credit card readers are now accessible. And they’re affordable; Square Card, at least, will pay you back for your purchase, has no annual fee, and charges 2.75% on CC purchases, without any hidden fees.

Over the past several months, I’ve started to see more and more of them in public; everywhere from mini golf to cafes to musicians. They’ve become the quintessential tool of the mobile small business. I’ve even seen some craigslist ads saying that they take credit card via smartphone card reader!

Because who carries cash? Cash is bulky, has more liability, and is dirty. A card has insurance, rewards points, and isn’t bulky. I saw someone pull out a checkbook at the grocery store the other day. What the heck??

In this day and age, most people just expect to pay with a card. Sure, it’s led countless Americans into staggering debt, but if you’re not spending beyond your means, it's the preferred convenience.

Historically, this has been a downfall of the small business owner, the mobile business owner, and the musician. Unless people plan on being somewhere where they’ll need cash, a lot of times they’ll only keep a limited amount on them. And if someone like that stumbled into your small business or happened to see your show, you were out of luck. Maybe it doesn’t happen often, but the number of times I’ve heard “sorry, I don’t have cash,” have certainly added up through the years.

Since I’ve gotten my own card reader, that issue is a thing of the past. And the few CD sales and tips I get from cards actually ads up to be able to pay for my data plan most of the time. That is income I would otherwise have not gotten.

But here’s the thing: I only do this part time. Part time as in, with my next few shows, my show count will be 11 for the year.

It got to the point to where it didn’t make sense for me to not have a smartphone anymore. And it was primarily because of this capability. I couldn’t afford to lose potential fans because I didn’t have a way to accept money from them. If I see someone, regardless of how great they are, I’m much more likely to follow up with the artist if I have something tangible in my hands leaving the show.

You may never have a second chance to make a fan or make a customer. Every additional way you can accommodate others will make them more likely to repeat your story.

And as a small business owner or musician, you can finally do that in a way that monetarily benefits you! At the price of a handful of small fees.

It makes sense. The entry level for old credit card readers was something like $250; that’s a lot of sunk cost for a small business. And on top of that, you still had the card fees. Now, for the cost of a phone data plan, which you probably already have, you can have the same thing.

But some people don’t get that. Businesses, especially around where I live (Central Pennsylvania), can’t see past the fees. Kelly and I had to turn around when we got to the front of the line in a very well established ice cream parlor down the road from us because they didn’t take cards. The soft pretzel lady at the grocery store was lucky I had cash after taking my pretzels and finding out that they didn’t take cards. And there’s a sandwich shop in my hometown that directs you down the street to an atm…

It’s a disservice to customers and a disservice to yourself to not utilize technology so readily available.

Plus, the smartphone swipers act as a sign that you actually know what you’re doing trying to run a small business or make a career out of music. I’d much rather my business go with the well-informed entrepreneur with an up-to-date business model than to the one stuck in the past.

New Headphones

Switching headphones. Not a big deal, right? I mean, it’s more a thing of comfort and style, right?

False. In this day and age, yes, comfort and style tend to take precedence over functionality, but what a shame it is that the main focus has fallen from the music. What a wonderful society we live in…

In reality, for those who care about music, the audiophiles to whatever degree you can afford, it’s about the sound quality. Always. Comfort is a thing of functionality, not to be wrapped up in the guise of style.

So you have headphones covering a vast gamut of the function/comfort/style continuum. I’d take studio monitors any day of the week, in an isolated room, but that’s not practical in all cases, unfortunately. So I’ve been stuck with a pair of original Apple earbuds for quite some time. You know, the ones that came out with ipods back in the day.

I’ve wanted a nice pair, maybe Sennheiser HD600s or 700s, for a while now. I heard some rave reviews from some audiophile icons, but I shouldn’t afford stuff like that. $400-$1000 for headphones? One of those things that you could do, but really, really shouldn’t. So I’ve resisted. But if you’re not going for gold, then what’s the point? I don’t like to upgrade in multiple iterations; I prefer to go for the best and then wait a long time until whatever gadget is more or less obsolete. I was the one who waited until a few months ago to hop on the smartphone bus, remember? I’m slow to change, but go all in when I do. So, while I’ve thought about an incremental step, something like Beats (of which I've heard mixed reviews for the price point), it just doesn’t make sense. And in that time, I’ve been stuck with earbuds.

When Apple came out with the ipod/earbud package, it was all about delivery. The sound quality wasn’t quite there and the earbud quality wasn’t quite there, but the package deal offered accessibility that was contagious. I waited a bit on the ipod, until I could buy a used 5th gen (better sound than those that followed) for $50 from a friend. And I got the earbuds to match. And, while I’ve upgraded the ipod to a bigger one (60GB up from 30GB, which still isn’t enough!), the earbuds have remained. Seriously, these things are like 8 years old!

But I recently got a smartphone. The HTC One, to be exact. And they came with headphones/earbuds; the nice kind with the silicone pieces that conform to your ears and act as passive noise-cancellers. Allegedly, these are, more or less, Beats, resembling them in nearly every way. However, they stayed in their package until last week …because I had my earbuds.

Then last week I opened them up to give them a try. I listened for an album or two and was impressed, but they didn’t fit right, so I left them sit. Well, today I just got out the other silicone ear pieces and found some that fit.

And the sound?! Oh my! I knew the earbuds were bad. I knew that I had been doing a disservice to good music. Maybe I was in denial? Maybe I was numb after seeing the $1000 price tag of the HD700s? Actually, that’s probably pretty close to it.

The difference is similar to the background noise I spoke of only days ago. I didn’t realize the richness I was missing. I mean, I knew, but I didn’t understand. It’s like a veil has been lifted.

The bass response is so much more defined. The thump of the bass drum and the low roar of the bass are resonant as never before. The highs are crisp without being tinny. They didn’t even sound tinny before, actually; now, in comparison, they do. And the mids are balanced. You can hear everything nearly as intended.

Which got me thinking… I mean, I did just release a new album. And, to be honest, I reviewed most everything on either my old earbuds or in my car. Rookie mistake, but, again, I didn’t want to pitch for the $1000 headphones to do the job “right.” But now I’m listening to the album. And …dang. The intricacies coming out are unbelievable. The fact that it’s a live recording is so much more apparent with the little artifacts founds throughout the background. This is nuts!

So I've followed with some of my other favorite albums/bands: Portishead's self titled, Between the Buried and Me's latest, This Will Destory You, Trevor Gordon Hall, and the list will go on. It's almost like rediscovering this music.

Yes, I could still pick these apart. They're still not quite the same as live, but that's not the point. The point is that these were so accessible and right under my nose! And these came with my phone, at no additional cost!

Which is making me think… how much better is the real deal? Yes, I’ll probably stick with these for the foreseeable future. And it will be without looking back. Seriously, it’s only been a few albums worth of listening so far, but I can’t see myself going back. And I’m more anxious than ever to move forward.

Background Noise

We are bombarded by sound. Whether it’s blatantly in the foreground, or passively in the background, there is almost always something, however passive it may be, that is interrupting the intended signal that is reaching our ears.

In most cases, these go unquestioned and we continue on our lives. We become immune to things like the hum of the air conditioner or the rushing of the wind as we drive with our windows down. We’re aware that these sources of noise are present, but we just compensate for them and assume all is well. After all, if you can increase your signal to noise ratio, you should be able to understand more of the signal.

But what I’ve been noticing, and note that this is something I’ve known all along, is that, with music, the noise still has a significant impact on our perception. Depending on what the source of the noise is, it can represent very complex aural interference. All of the sudden, you have areas of frequency response that are muddied and cluttered to the point that everything within those specific ranges seems like it is part of the noise. Accordingly, we filter them out.

That’s the idea behind noise-cancelling headphones; we want to get rid of those sources of audible sludge. We want to cancel out the AC or the roar of a plane on a long flight. In general, headphones help with these sorts of noise sources, but sometimes they’re not an option and sometimes they still don’t do the music justice.

At that point, all the more you can do is try to eliminate the sources of noise. The difference will be surprising.

I’ve had the latest August Burns Red album playing in my car lately. I wanted a place to listen to it the whole way through and unfortunately I can’t just sit down at home with that sort of time; driving is often times the best opportunity. So I’m listening to it in my car. It’s got a good sound system, but nothing too great. I can deal with that. The big thing, though, was that I started to listen to it on a nice day, with my windows down.

Wind blowing in your ear, cascading between panes of glass, especially when coupled with the purr of the engine, destroys your mid range frequencies. I could crank the volume up as loud as possible, but vocals, chuggier guitar riffs, and a lot of tom work was just non-existent. Eventually, I rolled up the windows. Granted, there was still some car and road noise, but it cleaned things up that it was like listening to a whole new album; the difference was staggering. There was newfound clarity that so many others would have probably never even thought about.

And we don’t think about stuff like that. Music is considered background so often and is treated as such. Just this morning (Tuesday, i.e., country day at work) I was trying to block out the music in the office. It was working pretty well, sinking softly behind the hum of the AC. Then, for the first time in months, the fans shut off. The deafening silence pushed the music to foreground to an inescapable level; I had to reach out to my ipod.

But again, this idea that noise is dictating how we perceive music was thrown in my face. You probably have no idea how much richness is being choked out by a low signal to noise ratio. Not everyone has the resources to make an acoustically sound listening room to listen to music in perfect isolation. Not everyone can afford a $600 pair of really good headphones. But there are little things that make a huge difference, if you're willing to seek out change.

But if it’s an anomaly that even the bad music is void of such frequency convolution, how do we get good music to cut through?

Getting Away from Stagnation

So you’ve got a hit. It’s like finding that one venue you love; maybe they buy the most merch, or perhaps they just show up in droves with staggering attendance. Regardless, you’ve got something good and it’s attracting the droves. You want to do it over and over again, right? You want to play that same show over and over again and write songs that sound like the hit you’ve created.

But what’s that worth? Is it music or a hit generator? Maybe your music is contagious and you can sell anything, but if you’re just doing more of the same, there’s no progress. And that’s not music. It’s supposed to be this life-long endeavor that revolves around sound and expression. And those are ever-changing. Music evolves along with the rest of society. You have to keep up creatively in order to be relevant. A hit that sounds like another hit – or even two shows that are indistinguishable – that’s not music.

With whatever you’ve got that’s good, you’ve got two choices. Either you can cash out on it, or you can use it for progress. If you want to sound the same and continue to polish whatever dying paradigm you’ve discovered, go ahead, be the next 90’s boy band or the next Nickelback. But if you want sustainability, don’t slow down; keep evolving. Take your hit and learn from it; take your favorite venue and learn from it. Polish the musical experience; the expression and emotion of sound. Don’t polish a formula. If you’re stuck polishing that formula, eventually you’ll be passed by.

That means that your next song can’t be like the last; the next time you play that venue can’t mimic the last. And it’ll be a struggle, but it’ll push you out of what is comfortable. The more comfortable music you make, the more you’ll fall into a box.

This has been on my mind a lot lately. As I’m continually looking for new and exciting ways to exploit my guitars and the signal that passes from them to my amps, I look to see what boxes I have placed myself in. This is especially important because I frequent the same venues. I’m not doing huge tours; I’m playing the same venue 2 or 3 times a year. Which is nice for consistency, and it’s nice because I don’t have time to travel all over the world. But it gets you comfortable. I shouldn’t be giving people the same show they saw 4 months ago. That’s what Netflix is for, and the internet.

Comfortable, to me, is playing the same songs in the same order; it’s using the same stories and illustrations. Comfortable to me is the same tuning, or the same tempo, or the same key. I’m quick to point out comfortable, but like so many others, slow to implement change. But that is how you progress.

Some of the best gigs I’ve played lately have been me forcing myself from stagnating. I’ve intentionally omitted stories and have added details to others. I’ve intentionally mixed up my set list. I’ve gone so far as to intentionally change parts of songs mid-song. Yes, sometimes it’s because I forget parts; however, lately it’s been because I want every single show to be unique and I want to be able to express myself in real-time, rather than express myself from when I first wrote the song. IT’S MUSIC; YOU HAVE THAT FREEDOM.

You don’t want people to think that they can just catch you next time or that you’re the guy with that one song. Those are evidence that you’re going nowhere. Maybe it sells, but you’re musically bankrupt. And it won’t take long before people start to recognize that. Then you’ll be left with no hits and no venues you want to return to.

It’s a conscious decision. And it’s a tough one. Depending on your genre and your audience, people may not like something that’s new; it may only be acceptable to play hits. I’ll admit it; every time I go to see August Burns Red, I want to hear The Seventh Trumpet. That’s how lots of fans are. But don’t let it become where you’re a cover band of yourself. Because that’s one step closer to being a cover band. And they make me throw up in my mouth. That’s not music; it’s regurgitation.

But the anti-cover band is another discussion… My point is that you can’t get into that stagnation; it will suffocate your music. Intentionally pick a new key or a new tuning. Study a genre outside of what you play; then implement the techniques! Stop resolving notes at the end of a song. Play out of tune and make it sound good. The possibilities are endless! Just be sure you’re taking your music somewhere.

Objective Reasons Why Country Music Sucks (pt. 2)

Ah, another Tuesday. Another day jam packed with music’s distant cousin, country. It always has me thinking; I just don’t get this stuff. And if you’ve followed me for a while, you’ll know this. For it’s a well-known fact that I abhor country music. I’ve mentioned it several times and even once wrote just about objective reasons why country music sucks (this is the sequel).

The response to that blog is interesting. It’s an anomaly of sorts. I’ve had friends tell me they liked it and agree, but that’s not out of the norm. The part that’s out of the norm is that out of roughly 7000 views on over 100 blog posts, as of today, it has over a thousand views. Over the past several months, it has consistently gotten well over a hundred views a month.

And I know those aren’t big numbers. I do this for fun. I enjoy writing and if others enjoy reading my writing, then great! But, I mean, I’ll only publish a few things a month; I just don’t have the time. There’s plenty to write about, but there are rocks to climb and snow-capped mountains and, well, writing just doesn’t motivate me the same way.

But out of only a handful of posts and a few thousand views, here’s what’s interesting:












This is a screenshot of some of the search criteria that has led people to view my blog. Again, the numbers are small, but statistically, they are significant. There’s an overwhelming response has come from others who have a similar distaste for the genre. It’s unfortunate, on one hand, that they’re not all searches for me; I guess I’m just not that popular! But a disdain for country music? That seems to get the fish biting!

So I thought I’d come up with some other rather objective reasons as to why country music sucks. As much as I’d love more views and higher viewership, mainly I just need to get this frustration out ..and I am really interested in seeing the metrics of this particular post compared to non-country bashing posts.

We’ll pick up from where the last blog left off:


4. Emotionless. Isn’t music about expression? That gives music dimension; it brings depth. If you’re trying to tell a story, tell it like you have a vested interest in it. If you’re angry, show it; if you’re upset, sound like you care; if you’re in love, sound like it. I’m listening to this stuff right now and, unless I focus on the words, the music, song to song, is all the same. I can’t derive any meaning from the inflection. There is no soul. These are just notes. And twangy notes at that; the worst kind.

Alternatives? Something folksy (isn’t that where country has its roots?), like Iron and Wine, where there’s dialogue and inflection and so much more organic emotion. Plus, Sam Beam's story telling is pretty great. Something folksy/rocky/experimental-ly like mewithoutYou, where there is real story-telling and the music is driven by emotion wrapped in metaphor. Or, for something completely different, Listener, for more of an emotive spoken word. You can feel the music with these. They don’t sound like some bloviating Texan corporate monolith. Feel!

5. It keeps trying to be mainstream Rock or Pop. Why?! At this point, it’s hard to tell that the genre is rooted in folk rather than rock or pop, based on much of what is mainstream. That leads to more emphasis on the hook, more emphasis on song structure, and more repetition. It’s a pretty universal idea that those formulas are what sell; that’s what’s done it for rock, pop, and everything else that has made it into the public conscience. Country is just exploiting these songwriting elements and making them more formulaic than they ever have been.

Alternatives? Real rock and real pop.

6. It pushes no boundaries. Music used to be about pushing boundaries; that’s what made it exciting. The stuff they play every Tuesday here at work is positively dull. There are different tempos and different keys, but nothing that makes you go Wow. The only thing new in country is that it can no longer survive as its own genre. Music isn’t about hiding behind the guise of another.

Alternatives? Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. Not a personal favorite, but everything I’ve heard of theirs has been pushing boundaries. There’s innovation, texture, and depth. Plus, they’ve got a banjo; that should appeal to the country folk…



And I’ll stop with those three. Perhaps I’ll continue with more at another time. Again, these are generalizations, but I am trying desperately to be unbiased and objective.

Any other thoughts? I’d love to hear other arguments against …or even for country. It would be interesting to know what it is that doesn’t drive others away.

Music and Money

mu·sic [myoo-zik]: noun
1. the art of making money and being famous.

So I keep reading these Lefsetz posts on this deal that Jay-Z has going with Samsung. The gist of it is that Samsung is buying a million copies of Jay-Z’s new album at $5/ea and is giving them out with free via android apps to Galaxy users.

It’s an innovative idea. It’s a good idea; it hasn’t been done before. I’d go as far as to say that I almost like the idea. But here’s the kicker… SoundScan, this company that tracks music sales won’t recognize those sales (i.e., the album won’t default to debut at #1), and Jay-Z is in a huff. As if $5 million up front isn't enough?

At what point did our musicians become business moguls? When did numbers and fame replace substance and soul within art? Sure, you can brand yourself by throwing your face on a t-shirt or a poster, but there’s a line that’s crossed when you use your brand influence in buying companies, investing in tech, or engaging in any type of corporate warfare.

These big name artists are starting to see themselves as bigger than the music. Yes, it is true that most music these days, especially in top 40, music has less and less substance, but the nature of art should always be bigger than the artist. Does it really matter that Picasso painted it, or that Beethoven composed it? The individual can be a great artist, but the art isn’t great because of the artist. Good art should sell itself. If it’s not selling without millions in endorsements, a brand, and an artist figurehead, at what point can it just be considered part of the investment portfolio?

We’re evolving into a society where this corporate artist is romanticized, but the art is forgotten. That’s a great way to completely lose sight of the music. See, art is something that pushes boundaries; it evokes emotion; it challenges us. That’s not what this music is doing.

Olympic Music for Free?

So I'm reading my facebook feed and see that Andy McKee has posted something. He usually has good things to say, so I took a look:
http://www.theleadingevents.com/?p=6538

As some of you might know, the Olympics are sometime soon. That's about all I know; I've been too busy to bother with actual dates and all of the hoopla that is associated with big sporting events.

But this article touches on the music of the Olympics. I do music stuff sometimes, so that interests me. And if you think back to when they were in Beijing, China, there was a lot going on with music, especially for the opening ceremonies. It was pretty neat and will be a hard act to follow. So it does beg to question what London has planned??

Well, the plan is to not pay the musicians. It's for "exposure."

One word of the article sticks out: ethics.

As a charitable event? Sure, "exposure." As an audition for a bigger, paying gig? Maybe. As an unestablished act at a small local venue? Maybe. But at an event where everyone else is fairly compensated and even getting to the event could cost thousands? Ethics?

And they're being written off as "volunteers?" When is a professional service a job for a volunteer? Volunteering generally requires no skill. A volunteer is a body with basic functions. A volunteer doesn't do something for "exposure."

So ultimately, despite calling them volunteers, you have professionals paying their way for a chance at some exposure. Not a garage band trying to hit it big, mind you. These are professionals who do this for a living. They will be providing a value-added service for free, to the benefit of all those who are getting paid for their value-added, professional services.

To the core, this is unethical. The worst part is that this will most likely not be stopped. Actually, no, the worst part is that people don't see a problem with this. They see playing music as "fun" and novel, but not as a job. It's a silly thing that grown men do to prevent themselves from growing up and facing the real world. But let's say that all of those people weren't in music because all music, musical services, etc. were free? Our airwaves would be filled with Justin Bieber and similar children who don't have to make a living.

Which is why you pay musicians. "Steal" my music all you want, but my services - the services of musicians everywhere - should be compensated.

Think about a sweat shop. Can we agree that they are unethical; people working for pennies a day? Well, take those pennies away. And then endorse it by the global community.

PRG Rope Burn

This past weekend, Kelly and I went to the Philly Rock Gym Oaks and competed in their Rope Burn competition. It was actually her idea. The comp was open to all skill levels, so we went in as novice, expecting there to be tons and tons of competition. After all, neither of us had ever competed before and when the guys ahead of us said they climbed 5.10s and 5.11s, they were only placed in as intermediates. We may have climbed a few 5.10s, but not more than a handful and definitely no 5.11s.

I’ll get right to the punch with this one – we both won first in our level and were told we should try intermediate next time. Kelly would have placed in intermediate with her score, but I would have fallen short by a few hundred points… It’s something to work towards, but not too bad all the same.

It was a great experience and definitely a new view of climbing. One thing that really stood out, though, was the number of young climbers there. We’re used to Reading Rocks where the kids there are either with boy/girl scouts or birthday parties. The regulars are college aged and older. Naturally, we figured there’d be tons of adults in the comp. Instead, we were outnumbered by the youth – and those were only the youth that had made it to the final round. We later found the score sheet from the youth comp, which was 2 pages of names in about 8 point font; probably about 150 kids or thereabout.

I think it shows an interesting shift. When I was a youth, kids played team sports. Unless you were practicing with your team, you really weren’t able to practice the sport. Sure, you could practice juggling a soccer ball, but without others, you couldn’t practice playing soccer. It’s not quite the same.

With things like cross country it’s a bit different. You can run on your own and, ultimately, no one cares about your team’s performance. And maybe that’s a good comparison because I think that these kids were also on teams, where there was a team score, but you worked for your own individual score. The team performance is a great measure of the caliber of your training, but that’s all.

What it seems like is that we have this changing definition of what a team is. We now have climbing teams in the way that we have snowboarding teams. You’re no longer reliant on the rest of the members of a team to be successful.

And that’s what we’ve seen in music in the past decade. You no longer need ANYONE. Whether you’re a band or a solo act, you no longer need a “team” to succeed. As technology has advanced, more and more is able to be DIY. You can record in your bedroom, do your own publishing, book your own shows, and publicize your own material. It’s a full time job, but it’s the full time job of an individual, not of some corporate entity.

This aligns well with the ever fleeting need for a label. It used to be that that was the only way, but now it’s common knowledge that you don’t need them. They can enable a lot of neat things – organizing tours, collaborations, etc – but are not necessary. You can succeed without them.

But to succeed, you have to dedicate your life to it. While we were there, we talked to the one kid’s dad about the youth programs. They were from North Jersey, but would travel all over the place to compete. The previous weekends, they had been up in Massachusetts for competitions. For climbing competitions?! On top of an almost certainly grueling training schedule, this kid is traveling up and down the east coast. And all of the kids there were pretty much like that from what I could gather.

These kids are competing. So are you. You may not be lined up next to your competitors, but know that you’ve got every other musician out there vying to flood peoples’ airwaves. And there will always be someone who will do it for cheaper or for free. You have to be the best. And that takes no team.

Matt Walsh at the Collaboratory

Yesterday I had the pleasure of getting to hear Matt Walsh speak at the Collaboratory at Messiah College. I know, I graduated last year, but I still help out with Collab and really wanted to hear Matt. He and his family are missionaries at the center that I was at in Burkina Faso two summers ago. That, and he’s got good things to say.

Through his talk, he had a lot of great things to say with regards to work in Burkina, as well as work in other non-westernized cultures. Though one thing struck me… and I think it has to do with actually having gone over there and being a bit older and, perhaps, a bit wiser.

His point, the shot no one saw coming, was that sometimes we need to impede our successes. We need solutions that are both “good” and also sustainable. An overnight boom in anything is seldom sustainable and, often times, it’s “goodness” is measured strictly in quantity. In the case of Matt’s work, he provided many examples of foreign aid on things like crop yield that, overnight, would double or triple yields, but in the process would cripple communities and actually increase poverty in the area.

In the case of this blog, with the main focus on music, the same can be applied.

One of your worst fears as an artist is to explode overnight. So many strive for it and anxiously await the day, but it seldom does any good. You’ve seen it so often (i.e. top 40), where all of the sudden everyone is singing the same song and everyone likes the same band and it seems like everything is going well for said artist.

Fast-forward a week or two from that instance. Has the song been forgotten? Overplayed ad nauseam? Has the artist been forgotten? At that point, maybe not. But then fast-forward a few years. In almost all cases, you’ve got a burned out act playing dumpy bars and clubs, riding the coat-tails of the good ‘ole days.

Instead, you want something sustainable. You don’t want a fling with success, you want a career in it. And a career is sustainable. A career isn’t made with a hit. A career isn’t made by hype. Those are quantitative results, recklessly obtained with no regard for quality. People see that and that’s why they forget about you.

You need to build slowly. The fans you get shouldn’t be the drifters, following whatever the tastemakers are saying is hot. The fans you get you want to be life fans. Those are fans that know when you’re in their city and know when your next big project is coming out. Those are the people who you talk to after the show and have meaningful conversations with. Those are the people that you smile to and thank for coming to the show. They will build your career and sustain it for you.

It’s always about the fans; always about the people. If it starts to be about the money, the hype, and the fame, you’ll all but be forgotten tomorrow.

SOPA

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/01/19/anonymous-hackers-claim-to-take-down-justice-department-website-in-retaliation/

So it's the Stop Online Piracy Act... Perhaps you've heard of it? It's basically everyone up in arms like how it was with Napster back in the day.

And as I'm sitting here typing this, crazy stuff is going down. See, a preemptive strike was made, shutting down megaupload.com. It's a site where you could upload music, videos, etc. Basically, it was "legally" used for piracy, like half a million other sites are, where you get others' uploaded content. Like Napster, but less blatantly illegal. But after word got around that that happened, that brought Anonymous, a global collective of hackers, out of the woodwork. Now they're going on a hacking spree. Here's the count so far:

1. justice.gov
2. universalmusic.com
3. riaa.org
4. mpaa.org
5. copyright.gov
6. hadopi.fr
7. wmg.com
8. usdoj.gov
9. bmi.com
10. fbi.gov

But what's the big deal with piracy?

Piracy is "theft." It's people stealing things they don't believe they should have to pay for. We live in a day and age where you can have anything and everything at your fingertips. It's no surprise. It's an age where it's harder to "make it" not only because of there being less money in recorded media, but there's also so many more people fighting for the same taste of the limelight.

The old way is done. You won't make money selling cassettes the same way that CDs are on their way out. I still like CDs, but it's all digital now. And digital, people believe, should be free.

As an artist, I'm actually all for sharing media. If you want to "steal" my music, please, do. Today, you need people listening to you. No one is willing to spend money on something they don't believe in, so first you've gotta make them believe in you. At that point, you've got fans, not just people spending money blindly. You actually have people vested in you. And that's how it should be.

I have no problem "stealing" music online from sites like megaupload. I limit my buying to two cases: artists I know or see/have seen live and artists that absolutely blow me away. The second accounts for hardly any of my music. But after downloading something, if I like it, I'll tell people about them, I'll see them live, and buy merch when I see them live.

Those complaining about piracy haven't caught on. Money isn't in the media, but in the experience. Make people want to support you and come up with new ways for that to happen. Innovate or be left behind ...or, as the case is today, HACKED :)

Get Back Up

I just got back from a weekend in New York with Kelly and her family. We were taking her sister, Jamie, back up to school and, while we were in the area, took a couple days to snowboard. It was a lot of fun and, since I haven't posted anything in a while, I feel like I should somehow relate snowboarding to music...

So here's what I've got:

The most important thing you can learn from snowboarding is to get back up. When you fall, you can either quit or you can get back up. Those are your only two choices and, as the case is with snowboarding, you are faced with that choice often.

See, snowboarding has one of the highest learning curves of any sport. If you didn't learn to snowboard when you learned to walk, tough luck. You WILL fall and you WILL get hurt. And it will take a long time until you are "good" at it. Through all of that, most people give up. You get a taste of snowboarding that is associated with catching your edge and having your head slammed into the ground. It's not a good feeling, but it is part of the learning process.

Me, being the adrenaline junkie that I am, have gone through all sorts of injuries in my learning process. I like to say that I was "raised" by skiers, as most of the guys I hung out with while I was learning were all experienced skiers. Experienced, meaning that I was constantly being pushed to go faster, steeper, and bigger than I would have liked. This led to injuries on all parts of my body - a fractured tailbone, unknown injuries to my knees and wrists, a mild concussion or two, etc.

When you're laying on the ground, wondering if you can move your legs and arms, you feel like quitting; like it's not worth it. Then you get up and do it again (sometimes after days or weeks of recovery). It's either because you've got masochistic tendencies or because you're passionate about what you do.

The first day we were out, Kelly and I took Jamie. Maybe she only got in 4 or 5 runs over the course of the day, but she ended with some accomplishments. Being able to link a few carves together is impressive, regardless of the swollen knees and sore appendages that it took to get there.

So this is where it ties to music. You WILL write crappy songs. You WILL play crappy shows. You'll hear people that can play circles around you. And you can either push on or you can give up. But if you're going to push on, do so intentionally. Bounce ideas off of friends, study your recordings, watch video of your performances. Go out with some intention on getting better. If you settle for what you're failing at, you'll just fall again and again.

And seriously, we don't need people who put out the same sound and the same performance over and over again. Know that it's okay to fall. You just have to get back up and keep moving forward.

5.10

What do you want to be good at? What do you want to succeed in? And more importantly, how are you getting there?

If you want to be famous, go play in traffic. You’ll make the news. Better yet, film yourself doing it. Youtube will eat it up …for a few days.

But if you want to do something great or to be a better person, it won’t happen tomorrow. Or next week. It takes time and push to get anywhere. If you’re lucky enough to be handed something “successful,” you still aren’t “successful” until you’ve tackled adversity and dealt with bad times.

Tuesday, at the climbing gym, my girlfriend climbed a 5.10 on her first try. A few months ago she was too afraid of heights to climb the whole way up the wall. To put it in perspective, there are 8 different “colored” routes at the gym, white through black. She started at white. This was a green, with only blue and black above it.

To get to that point took a lot of hard work. To start, she was afraid of heights. For most fears, the best way to deal with them is to face them. Climb a 35 foot wall enough, and suddenly 35 feet isn’t so high. Maybe you’re still afraid of heights, but you’re not afraid of 35 feet.

Beyond that, a 5.10 is pretty nuts. It takes a lot of skill development and strength; skills and strength that you only get through constantly being challenged. On easy climbs you have huge jugs to hold on to. It’s essentially like climbing a ladder; one hand after the other and one foot after the other. As you move up, the holds get smaller. Suddenly, you’ve got small pockets, pinches, and crimps. Your holds go from being 6 inches off the wall to being half an inch or smaller. And instead of a logical hand-over-hand progression, you’ve got places where you match a foot on a hold your hand is on and other places where you’re laying back with your shoulder into the wall. You have to not only learn these techniques, but you also have to learn when to use them and how to use them effectively.

And if you can’t constantly be looking ahead, you’re going to get stuck. I push pretty hard with climbing. Generally, I slow down when I feel like I’m risking injury and become reckless. If you’re not pushing towards that, then you’re not being challenged enough. You don’t want to push past that point, but you want to go right up to it and stare it in the face.

It’s a progression. We all start out playing individual notes or chords in whatever we do. It’s a slow process, note by note. Then you start to learn skills and technique. You practice endlessly until it hurts. Then you practice more and it hurts more, but it’s a good hurt because you understand it. Finally, you work on developing those skills and being innovative. That last step is a life-long work. It involves few of those days where your fingers are raw because you’ve already built up the calluses. But you can’t ever be comfortable with where you’re at. To be great, you don’t stop at 5.10, because there is 5.11.

It’s really great to see Kelly progress how she has. And it’s encouraging to know that my moderately aggressive teaching style gets results. But she’s far from done. We’re both taking December off, but come January, we’ll be picking back up, moving back up to the 5.10s and looking ahead.

Motivation

What no one wants to say, but you needs to hear, and you need to be reminded of periodically –

You’re not good enough. Your music sucks.

Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s not. It doesn’t matter. The point is that that should be a trigger. You need to be pushed so hard that you either collapse and give up, or you push back so hard that you prove everyone wrong. See, when you think the world is against you, that’s all you have; to give up or to push through with every ounce of your being. And without pushing that hard, you’ll always fall short.

Giving 110% is a thing of the past. If you want to do that, you become a doctor or a lawyer, not a musician. As a doctor or lawyer, even getting through school, you have the world telling you that statistically you won’t make it through to the next level. My engineering class started with about 60 students. We ended with 23. 23 could give what it took.

But with music, so often a free ride is expected. Musicians are notorious for expecting success out of waking up at noon, wasting more time, and jamming for an hour or two a day. They’re the ones who have a handful of their friends and their parents telling them that their music is great and that they’ve got what it takes. Wake up.

Sure, there’s a lot of natural gifting that needs to be there and a lot of being at the right place at the right time. It is about who you know, but you also have to have the drive and perseverance to constantly demand more of yourself. You need 110% towards music or you need to be doing something else.

There will always be flukes; the stars that appear overnight. Blame it on the Disney Channel and Youtube, but don’t look at them for a success plan. If you do, you might as well be playing the lottery; you’re set up to fail. Make your keep by earning it.

You have to try your hardest and fail. You have to succeed and consider it failure because you didn’t do enough. You have to push yourself like you’re at the bottom even if you aren’t. Or give up.

Reading Poetry and Street Music Festival

It’s good to be ambitious. Ambition is one of the first steps in success. You can rarely have any type of sustainable success without the ambition to do what it takes to get there.

However, having too little ambition is just as dangerous as having not enough. Having too much ambition leads to failure – at least by the standards that you have set forth. I do this all of the time, knowing that I will fall short of my goals, but also understanding that setting the bar higher will have a better yield than if the bar were to be too low.

And this is fine …as long as this is out of the public eye. Prior to releasing my album, Deconstructing the Temporal Lobe, I was rather naïve to what all was involved in the CD releasing process. As a result, I was wrong with nearly every estimate that I gave people for a CD release date. I wanted recording to pressing to be in little more than a month. Well, it was something like 4-5 months, and even that was pushing some limits.

Being wrong like that, in addition to being embarrassing, can also ruin your public image and your credibility. Since that, I have, on occasion, made such a blunder as to project a time frame for my second album. It builds hype, but when those times come and pass, hype dies and so does your credibility. But I think I’m getting better. I’ve been a lot more conscious as to what I say in regards to anything uncertain. Ask me today when the second album will be out and I’ll flat out tell you that I need to make time to get into the studio and need to pull together funds as well. There isn’t a projected date because I haven’t scheduled my studio time yet. It’s pretty simple. I haven’t even planned the album out yet. These things are mildly important…

So what got me thinking of this was the 1^st annual Reading Poetry and Street Music Festival. The day-long event in downtown Reading was an effort to build community and to celebrate art, in conjunction with the global initiative, 100,000 poets for change. The festival was a great initiative and great to be a part of. In terms of exposure, it was rather weak, about the same exposure that I would get at an open mic. But that’s not what it was about. It was about building the city and celebrating poetry and music. And that’s what it did.

However, this post is about being over-ambitious. Though the festival was a great effort by many, it was incredibly over-ambitious. We’re talking 75 artists on 3 stages, street vendors, and part of a main street closed. For the first year of a volunteer-only funded project, that’s absolutely insane. That sounds more like the goal of an event that has been going on for 5-10 years.

Their main problem was going too big. All of their bases were covered, but on a small scale, not to the scale that the event was built to. It caused a compromise in things like publicity and technical planning. Publicity was rough, but thankfully everything worked out technically and it was a nice day, not rainy like the original forecast.

In being so ambitious, they also didn’t get to adequately qualify the artists. With something bigger like this, where everyone needs to do their part, I think it is even more important that some sort of contractual agreement be made between the event and the artist. I made a point to collect contact info in case of any issues, but other artists just straight up didn’t show. That speaks poorly for everyone. The only times I have been running late for a gig, I have made contact with someone at the venue so that I could get in and set up right away. I’ve never missed a gig.

These types of issues (no-shows, late acts, acts that went over their time limit) resulted in everything being about an hour behind schedule by the time I got there (from my other gig that morning). Which is to be expected …but could have been avoided.

As far as performer quality, most everything was decent from what I could see or hear. I enjoyed the 2 acts before me. Actually, the act right before me was a small band that had joined up with a drum circle for some on-the-spot collaboration. That’s what this was about. It was neat.

But when I first got to my stage I was nearly scared off by the act that was up. Some cross-dressing guy in a tight black dress and heels …with a whip …who was whipping people in the audience, singing about child abuse and the like. Yes, there is a fine line between art and perversion, but regardless of where you want to draw that line, a “family-friendly,” community event should not involve something like that.

Sometimes coming up short of your expectations is where you need to be. It helps you to learn. Sure, the attendance could have been better, acts could have been better organized, and the event could have been better publicized. I don't think anyone ever expected things to go down seamlessly. Really, you shouldn't. I’m excited for where this will go in the future. It’s part of a big effort to revive a city that needs some help. I hate cities, but if I'm going to live this close to one, I'd like to see it through that the city move in this direction. Reading won’t roll over in one day, but these are great endeavors and big steps forward. It’s great to see something so boldly ambitious.

Inaccessibility

It’s about inaccessibility. Not that your music can’t be easily obtained, but that you produce product that can’t easily be reproduced. Be it your live show, your technicality, or your obscurity, you need something that people can’t reproduce.

Once the masses can reproduce what you do, you can bet that someone can and will do it better. At that point, you’re expendable. Try to generate hype for something that’s expendable. It’s a tough sell. High school bands rarely make it. They’re expendable.

You need something unique. As far as a performance goes, Lady Gaga has something that you can’t match. That’s how she’s surviving; obscurity. With her music, I’d listen to my friend, Natalie Ness, do Gaga covers any day of the week over Gaga herself. If Lady Gaga didn’t have the shock factor – something unique – what would keep her from dying out? Nothing. She would be passed by.

Which is where most of today’s music lies. It has no intrinsic value or sustainability. It has celebrity-fashioned hype with no means of being unique. Yet so many still want to be on the radio and to fill the tabloids? The only future in that is a quick shot at fame followed by the long sobering journey back to being mortal.

The future of sustainable music is inaccessibility. Today is not a day to want to be on the radio if you want any remnants of your work around years down the road. 50 years from now, I won’t be listening to Justin Bieber. He's big because he's young and has a good voice. Once he's done being young, he'll just be another nice voice. Justin Bieber will be dead. However, I will still be listening to Mr. Bungle. They’ve long since passed already, but none come close to emulating what they do. They’ll be smaller cult followings, but with as much music as is being released in today’s age, your best bet is with a cult following. The masses will move on. They always do anymore. It will be people who know that you’ve got something inaccessible who will carry your name.

Likewise, 50 years from now, people will still be listening to Trace Bundy. At the very least, I will. He’s technicality that is unmatched. People still listen to and study Django Reinhardt, over 50 years after his death for the same reasons. You haven’t heard of him, but that’s because you probably don’t care enough to dig that deep. His music is studied because it has a level of inaccessibility that keeps the novice away and fascinates those willing to look. Do what he did with as few fingers as he had. Go ahead and try. You’ll be drawn in too, because it’s something no one else can offer (so few, in fact, that I can only find good clips of covers where people are using all of their fingers... Imagine this guy playing this song with only 2 fingers on his left hand.)

 So many are looking for their “big break” and Hollywood fame. Have something unique that other's can't do and you're untouchable. Do something like put a kalimba on your  guitar ...and then play the guitar and the kalimba simultaneously ...really well.

The outlet won't have to be crazy percussive fingerstyle/kalimba hybrid stuff. But it will have to be as inaccessible and hard to reproduce. That's what it will take.

Anathallo

This is a post from last week that I never got to post due to the whole lack of power thing...

On my way to work this morning, I opted for some Anathallo. They’d probably best be described as Orchestral Indie Pop. Yeah, something like that.

They’re somewhat of a toned down Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s. Their instrumentation varies song to song, occasionally incorporating horns, auxiliary percussion, and strings. They’re solid compositions and their albums flow beautifully.

They played a B-Sides at Messiah eons ago; my freshman year. I knew little about them. Scratch that, I knew nothing about them. But that’s the case with most B-Sides bands. You discover them there, on the spot, with no idea of what may be coming your way. So I was there, young and naïve of the capabilities of music, listening. It’s pop-like, but it’s so intricately woven together that you watch in awe, absorbing the experience.

It’s great when that happens.

So I started to listen to them after that, obtained (What? I was a broke college kid…) some of their music, and began including them in recommendations to others.

In all of this, I ended up playing them on our college radio station, WVMM.

I played them a few times; every few weeks. Though one time, in particular, sticks out.

After playing some Anathallo, my roommate/co-host, Ryan, and I were surprised to have two guys come breaking into the station. With limited access to the station, it was always surprising when anyone came in, let alone when someone came into the station and then into the actual soundroom where our show was being broadcast from.

Thankfully another song was on and we weren’t talking live. The guys burst into the room, hugged both Ryan and I, and then thanked us for playing the song. Sure our show was one of the best radio shows that the school has ever seen, but this was a first.

Listening to Anathallo on my way to work got me thinking about this. And radio. And how rare of a response that was that we experience. I’ve heard plenty of people get all worked up over their “favorite song” on the radio when it comes on, but that is a fleeting emotion. By the next week, someone elses barely palatable crap will be the new sensation. None of it lasts. No one would walk into a radio station and thank the dj for playing a song, regardless of how close to the station they were. Take note that these guys that I’m talking about didn’t even know Ryan or I.

It was weird and I think it freaked me out, but looking back on it, I’m realizing how this helps to illustrate why radio is dead. Everything is built on hits with shelf lives of weeks. Some of the only radio stations with any merit to them are those with talk shows or ones that play the classics. Not today's top 40. They play nothing of substance. That’s how you can have a little teeny-bopper giddy over a different song every week. They’re not real fans and the only reason they think they like the music is because that’s what they’re spoon fed to believe.

Anathallo has soul. They evoke emotion that can’t be understood in a club. That’s what the guys in the radio station reacted to. You don’t see others react like that because nothing on top 40 radio has life behind it. Adele seems to be the exception, but everyone else is so enamored by their celebrity status that they’re missing what music is about. Anathallo has never made it big, released big hits, or even had much radio play. But they get what music is about. And so did the guys in the radio station.