from twitter to legoland empire

hmm.. long time, no blog. So..

I swore I would not do this blogging thing for many reasons. From thinking I didn’t have anything all that interesting to say, to general insecurity from feelings of literary inferiority, etc. But a bit more than a year ago I started doing something else I swore up & down I’d never do- tweeting.

Why? Well like many things, we live our entire lives without them, and get along just fine, so whats the urgent need now? I still have mixed feelings about it. I mean here I am spending time trying to write coherently which is taking me away from my first love, making music. The clock is ticking, very apparent in my case, and I am burning minutes pretending to be an author. But everyone tells me I need to do this or nobody will know I have music to hear! OK, that makes sense. I think.. but I digress..

So I joined Twitter. For one reason- to follow Imogen Heap. I had just discovered her, “Ellipse” had completely blown my mind, and I read that she used Twitter to talk to her fans and I was definitely one of those. So upon activating my account I noticed she had roughly 1.5 million followers. Wow. OK, so getting through to her ain’t gonna happen. Silly me. (although she has tweeted me back on a few occassions) So, who does she follow and why? My first pick- Steve Lawson. It was by pure chance, but as many of you know @soloBassSteve is the “Cisco Router” of many things Twitter. Especially as they relate to music. And he followed me right back. Cool. Little did I know his tentacles were everywhere, and by watching him I could now go about selecting a nice virtual neighborhood to dwell in.

One of the nice folks he seemed to favor was a guy who lives in the next town over from me, Neil Alexander. Now, I had seen Neil’s name because he was right next to me on the all-important ReverbNation charts for our shared locale. And Steve was coming over here with his lovely family to do a house concert tour. So.. this guy from the UK is coming to the US and is going to be performing with a guy “down the street” from me. Thats just weird. I clicked on Neil and then went to see one of his one-man electronica shows. To say @nailmusic is talented is the definition of understated.

So Neil & I struck up a friendship, fueled by bi-weekly coffee conferences. I’m a bit of a loner by choice, but here was a guy I could hang with. We have the same interests. A passion for music, especially the electronic kind, and a tendency to find the world often preposterous, although our remedies would most often be diametrically opposed.

While the family Lawson was winding their way about, they stopped in Louisiana to hang with Mr. Trip Wamsley, another bassist extraordinaire. (as a long-time bassist all of these bassing wizards are driving me close to the point of not calling myself one anymore!) As always I listen to the music of these new folks, and we usually quickly become virtual friends. And I was again suitably blown away. I particularly enjoy Trip’s album “Curve”.

Some months later, while web-surfing and scouring YouTube for Michael McDonald videos, I happened upon a gentleman who had posted his rendition of “Takin’ It To The Streets”. This was one of the hippest covers ever, and a real lesson in the marketing wisdom of doing a great cover of  a monster hit. An amazing guitarist, this Rob Michael fellow, who can often be found under his band name of Atmos Trio.

Fast forward a few months… So I have just had a little burst of creativity and ended up with a half dozen pretty interesting little frameworks. But I really wanted to get some “new blood” on these tracks. I knew that I wanted these three guys to be the band. Neil said sure. And then after a tweet to Trip and Rob, who both to my very pleasant surprise said yes right away, Legoland Empire was born. I sent these tune sketches via the net to Trip and Rob. Louisiana and California. I’m in New York. They sent back these amazing tracks. Neil came over to my little studio and gave me take after take of incredible keyboard performances to pour through. In fact, I had so much good stuff that the hardest part was picking out the best bits in a manner that gave everyone their own piece of the canvas, and yet together was the seamless painting I wanted to present. And the beautiful artwork wrapped it all up very nicely. The amazing Linda Palmer contributed that. Another fantastically gracious and gifted person I met in my twitterverse.

I am thrilled with the way it turned out. I consider it an artistic success, and musically one of the best things I’ve ever been involved with. These folks were just total professionals all the way. They are such open-minded artists that they needed no hand holding from me. Their parts were exciting and original. And technology allowed instant access and workflow. I hope we can do it again. Soon.

Why do we do this..

(This was a response I had made in another forum to the never-ending discussion of trying-to-make-a-living as a working musician in the 21st century)

This IS a great discussion. The mindset that you must embrace, jmho of course.. is to just realize that as far as making money playing/recording music, its around 1960 again. Your recordings are (unless you are a “brand”) relegated to being a promo tool that you have to pay for. And of course your production costs can be literally anything you can afford. If you can get paying gigs, good for you! I made more money in high school playing gigs in the 1965-1975 paleolithic era than bands make now. And those were mid-20th century dollars, so roughly 3-4 times more actual money. By the early 70′s I was in bands, granted very good bands, that frequently made $1000-2000 on a good night. Now? You are lucky to make a few hundred dollars, since there are a thousand local bands who will gladly do the gig for free! This is technological progress folks, and the fact that everyone wants to be a “star” doesn’t help matters for those who “just” want to be a working musician. Thanks to the internet, YouTube, Idol, and the fact that you can make a decent recording with a laptop and a microphone, everyone actually thinks that they CAN be a star. (Who wants to work anyway?)  And many will get their 15 minutes.

So.. what to do? You have to deal with the reality. If you are still young and have the dream, go for it! Throw caution to the wind and spend every waking moment of your day self-promoting, and gigging your ass off for peanuts at night. If you are serious about your music, and don’t try with all your heart you WILL wake up one day with tears of regret for not giving it your all. Once you start approaching the ripe old age of 30, living in a van with 3-4 other people begins to get far less appealing.

But the really important thing that I cannot stress enough is this: I don’t know about you, but I fell in love with music and the mystery of creating it. It started for me at 9 years of age. By 13 I was tearing apart old record players, playing with tape recorders, trying to fathom how these beautiful sounds could possibly be created by mere mortals. 50 years later, as I sit in my comfortable, yet very modest (thanks to technology) studio, I still feel exactly the same way. It IS about the art. You do it because you have to. Not to please some A&R person, your parents, some girl, some nebulous group of people on MySpace, whatever. If you don’t play/paint/sculpt/write you will suffocate, or die of thirst. Did you become a musician to get rich & famous? If that is your goal, trust me…  the odds are stacked horribly against you. You may as well get a job on Wall St. It will be easier to attain. And as many of you probably know already, it is OK to have a day job. Its a very expensive world we live in (and about to get WAY worse, but I digress) and you have to eat. But you engage your art. Every day. Because you are an artist and its what you do. If you get famous savor the moment, as it is usually very fleeting. Unless you stumble upon something that has “big commercial potential”, you will eventually cultivate a small-medium group of followers/fans who enjoy and appreciate your work. The truly magnificently gifted will actually have careers. (And Madonna too) Maybe 50 years after you die someone will discover you and really appreciate something you left behind. That is why we do “art”. To make a contributory statement of the human experience, from our own unique perspective, that transcends time, and mere language. Did the first cave-dwellers draw on the walls hoping to get an agent?

I don’t write this to discourage anyone, but to help honestly evaluate and contemplate the environment we find ourselves in. Many will say this is the best time to be a musician. Level playing field, anyone can join the fray, etc. In a very real sense, they are correct. Others would say it absolutely sucks to try and make a living as a musician. And there is merit to this outlook, although you must remain stoic or you will just be depressed all the time. Its hard to swallow a DJ getting $1500 for a night of sequencing mp3′s off of their iPod, while you’re lucky to get $300 for your entire band!

So, in closing .. art? If its in you, you’ve just gotta do it. Commerce? .. well that is something else. I wish you all the most creative times. AND a belly full of beer.

The Big Calm.. thank you Mr. Post

Please enjoy while reading..

So.. I now enter the blogosphere. Please look past any ommissions, bad blog etiquette, etc.

These past few months, “the year so far” as one of my new twitfriends Matt Stevens describes it, have been surreal, addictive, frustrating, exciting, disappointing, bursting with hope & new ideas, and.. sad.

I have been blessed with many friends throughout the course of my life. The usual suspects.. siblings, best buddies in school, “partners in crime”, bandmates, relationships of all natures, etc. Like most men, bonding doesn’t appear to come as easily as it does for women, and although we sometimes beat ourselves up over not spending enough time, calling on the phone and general keeping-in-touch, we know that we are indeed bonded with friendship that is rock-solid deep and steeped in true love. I still consider my siamese twin (in a manner of closeness of course, not an Amanda Palmer schtick) since middle school as one of my best friends, even though I speak with him only about once every x years!

And like many of us, there are just a handful of truly amazing souls who you just can’t imagine getting along without. But thats just people like me. There are also people like Lenny Post who treat with that kind of love, honor and respect, everyone they encounter. I know as hard as I might try, I can never be that good of a person.

Lenny Post passed on, as they say, on May 18th of this year. I’m still feeling it. Just prior to his leaving us, I had decided to contribute some music to a little collaborative project initiated in the UK by another of my new twitfriends, Tom Slatter. Shortly after Lenny’s passing, I was sitting there in the warm glow of the recording studio and a little voice told me to go to the synths, program something interesting, and hit record. I, like many like-minded musical painters, generally take a bit of time (sometimes too much!) when doing our work, as we tend to procrastinate over minutia, or enter self-edit mode to try and determine if the painting is even worth laboring over. Or is just shit. But as sometimes happens the muse is in the room with you and it just all happens in the moment. The muse that evening was of course Lenny, one of the greatest audio engineers you would ever want to share air with. Somehow all these parts were going off right on cue, changing sound as if I had an extra two pair of hands, and in a single pass I had what you are listening to. (I did overdub the little vocal snippets the next day.) I write this to all who would read it, especially those that knew him, that he was still being my friend one more time. He was always there when you needed him.

This was one more last gift that Mr. Post gave to me. He was an extraordinary person. A gentleman, father, musician, engineer, and the dearest of friends. If his parting gift wasn’t enough, he visited me in the most remarkable dream a few weeks ago. Maybe that will be my second blog.