01 24 08 11:33 |No comments yet It's a spontaneous thing

Today I had the pleasure of working with Sean, a new host of the Sunny Side Up Show on PBS kid's Sprout. We put together a dance song using transportation sounds. Lots of fun. I'll try and post a video of it next week. While in the session we got to talking and it came up that i had made a few bluegrass recordings while in Michigan. I've been meaning to post our Middlehill "Pills to Purge Melancholy' record for some time now. I sat down today to do so and realised I don't have a copy. I've got the case but no CD. grrrr. In the meantime I've posted a video of Benjamin Teague and Elliott Earls playing "Dink's Blues" during one of those sessions. It's really pretty. Hope you like it. I'll post the entire record as soon I find it. Too many hard drives...

Spent more time writing Everything Burns tonight. I'm looking forward to letting you all hear it.

01 19 08 12:32 |No comments yet Sondheim's beat me up

Danielle Tobin and I saw Sweeny Todd last night at the Riverview. Some of you may know this, but I have a weakness for musicals (except those by A.L. Weber, but that's another post), and Sweeny Todd was a doozy. I loved it. It's a great re-imagining of the story and the new recordings of these amazing songs are sopt on. Kudos to the music producer and conductor. The costumes were killer as well. I'd dress like a blue collar bloke from that era everyday, if I could only find the duds. As I found with No Country for Old Men, some of the gruesomeness of it was a little over the top. There is 1980's Hong Kong (think Boxer's Omen) style blood squirting everywhere. I found it a little cheezy. Perhaps a political commentary? As the news networks are not showing us the mortality-checking images of some of the atrocities occurring around the world everyday, perhaps directors are serving them up. Well acted, well sung (in that easier to manage speak singing required by the songs), and beautifully imagined.

Looking forward to a full day at home working on "Everything Burns".

01 18 08 1:56 |No comments yet include free music

I attended the Junto at Punk Ave. The topic was the music business and the new distribution models that are challenging our notion of music as a business and presenting music creators with new challenges wrt getting music out there to the people. Mike Kiley of The Mural and the Mint and Kristen Thomson of the Future of Music Coalition were the moderators.

I'm of the mind that music should be free. That's what the marketplace is telling us. People are not placing the same value on .mp3 downloads that they did on vinyl or CDs. People want easy to access, free/inexpensive music. In light of this availability I think consumers are ingesting more music than ever before. Media file players are ubiquitous, it's almost too easy to create your own musical wall paper to accompany you throughout the day. Gone(more like going, probably) are the days of gathering around the turntable and really listening to a recording. So I think we music creators are being challenged like never before to create a sort of beacon than can keep an audience coming back. Look at the big mainstream entertainers of our time, Will Smith, Queen Latifa, Ice Cube, etc.. all have transitioned from being musicians to being entertainers. Adding skills to their quiver that keep them in the limelight and keep consumers coming back for more of their output.

Not to mention the huge hit to actual sound quality people are willing to deal with. No wonder hi - def audio has been on is death bed for years. 5.1 records? I think not. Can't enjoy them on the train, in the car, or at a cubicle. Forget it. Music is easier to make, easier to put out there, lower fidelity, and almost too abundant. It's never been better. More people making more music thats reaching more people than ever before possible. Yes please.

This does however make us change our expectations of monetizing out efforts in music. We need to redefine a successful record. How far can the money from a tour take you? We need to get better at licensing works to TV and film, make better use of touring support services like eventful.com, and we need to always have something new in the stream to keep listeners engaged and returning for more.

Last night, one of the Punk Ave. guys, Rick, mentioned something super important. Curators. How can a listener choose from this infinite pool of new music content. I love recommendation algorithms. I'm curious to see how important better music journalism will become. I'm suspicious of the lack of bad record reviews. It was good to see the booking agent from Johnny Brenda's there last night. She's curating new music, too.

Mike brought up subsidized music. It's coming. This record sponsored by Audi. The record is free but you can only get it from a slickly advertised site.

I could go on and on. My new record is coming along nicely. I've got our living room looking like a pawn shop. Accordion, banjo, uke, guitars, maracas, and piano bits everywhere. I'm taking advantage of Chrissy's 2 months away at Sculpture Space to get it all together. It's still titled "Everything Burns" and yes, it'll be available for nothing, right here.