The Light of Day

Scams as wish lists

I don’t really have a shape to this thought, so if you know what I’m getting at, feel free to pick up the ball and run with it.

It’s about things that are advertised, which we intellectually know to be untrue or misleading, but emotionally we’re kind of drawn to it anyway. Get rich quick schemes, for example. Mixed in with their misrepresentation of how feasible or sustainable their system is, is generally a valid motivational hook: have more free time to spend with your family and doing what you love, etc.. As much as this hook manipulates the gullible viewer’s perception of the scheme, by causing his sense of “good reason” to spill over into his attitude about the mechanics of the scheme itself, it works the opposite way for the skeptic: our intellectual knowledge of the flaws in the scheme spill over into a rationalization that “more free time” is impossible.

Instead of us shaking our heads in disgust that the worms on the hooks are made of rubber, why don’t we look at those fake worms as models, wish lists, or “vision boards“? We can say, yeah, that particular worm is fake, but how can we all work together to fill the world with real worms, so instead of running schemes to merely move wealth from person A to person B, we’d actually be creating more of that wealth for everyone?

And by wealth, I don’t just mean money, I mean time as well — actually more so, because unlike most of western culture, I value time more than money — and also the actual goods and services that money itself is just a medium of exchange for.

That said, my long term desire to free the entire world from long “check your human rights at the door” workdays and workweeks needs to be put aside in the short term. I can’t save the world until I figure out how to save me.

Quick plea to performing songwriters

If you perform covers and originals, please stop actually using the word “originals” (I have to work on this too). It attaches a stigma to your music. Present your music with the presumption of legitimacy that it deserves. Try this: at your show, don’t even tell them which songs are which. The focus is on performance, not songwriting. If someone asks about a particular song, “I wrote that” or “George wrote that” works fine. But in the energy and atmosphere of a live show, the experience will blur all the material into one overall vibe for most people; people don’t really latch onto songwriting until they’ve heard something a few times in their home or car.

Also, stop using the phrases “shameless plug” and/or “shameless self-promotion”. They were self-effacingly funny the first few times, but now that they’re commonplace, they come off like a desperate, passive aggressive sales pitch. Furthermore, it’s like starting sentences with with “I would just like to say that…”; they’re extra words that add no value for anybody. The DJ on the radio isn’t “shamelessly plugging” Black Sabbath. He just says “here’s Black Sabbath” and puts it on. Just say what needs to be said — “we’re blahblahblah, we’re at blahblahblah.com, our CD is over there (or better yet, refer to it by title instead of “our CD”), thanks for coming” — and trim off the fat.

Trust that your music has value of its own, independent of your salesmanship. It’s okay to be polite and show appreciation to your listeners, but there’s no need to reinforce the notion that your music is on a “lower rung” by repeatedly reminding the audience that you really really hope they’ll go to your website, and oh gosh you’d be so grateful if they’d please consider buying a CD because it’s so cheap.

Please copy the above plea and pass it along. Let’s all stop acting like wussies and present our music with the simple confidence it deserves.

I have a small audience, but I prepare for a large audience. I produce my recordings as if people will be picking apart at every detail and appreciating the extra care I put into them. I write posts assuming that people are interested. (Sometimes I’m okay with the small numbers and have more difficulty with the delay between creation and feedback — but of course larger numbers would shorten that delay.) Occasionally I have mini-breakdowns where I cry, throw fits, and question the worth of my existence, but then I get back on the horse and keep riding.

Validation is addictive, but not instructive. Commercially successful artists like to thank their audience for supposedly “making them what they are”, but the fact is, the audience didn’t pick out the chords or fuss over the lyrics. That has to be done alone, by the artist, in a void where he has no immediate feedback from anywhere but his gut, no matter how big of a star he is. Start making peace with that now, because although you say you’d love to be in a situation where your worst failure was going from an album selling 4 million copies to an album selling only 400,000 copies, that’s rejection by 3,600,000 fans. I haven’t experienced that, but it probably stings a bit.

You’re always going to be likening yourself to someone and differentiating yourself from someone else, so please, for all of us, help to rotate the line of differentiation so that it doesn’t fall squarely between independent and signed artists. So they have stars on their bellies and you don’t. Big deal. You’re not as different from them as you think you are, so stop playing up your “indieness” and just focus on being kickass.

(Dismounting soapbox and nodding politely to scattered applause)

Pulling a Radiohead…

For those of you that either link/bookmark straight to the blog, or use an RSS reader (and therefore skip the news page that keithhandy.com directs people to), you can now download and listen to Leave of Absence 2 in its entirety in 224 kbps mp3 format before deciding to purchase it! Nicely packaged CDs will continue to be available on lulu.com at a reasonable price if, like many people (myself included), you like physical objects.

I’ll soon write a more extensive post/page revealing more than you ever wanted to know about every single click, bang, and whirl on Leave of Absence 2.

Send some thanks to my friend Brooke for encouraging me to enter the twenty-first century. And be sure to check back for more music to come.

I must not rest on my laurels…

…because I’m not very good at it. It’s now the end of week #1 of Leave of Absence 2 being available on CD through Lulu.com. As experienced as I am at working on stuff, I have very little experience finishing and letting go of stuff, so that experience tends to be somewhat traumatic. I exaggerate, but I do have to make peace with the non-existence of an immediate stampede of customers; but the good thing is, if there’s anything technically wrong with the handful of discs that have been ordered so far — like gaps between the songs — it won’t be a nightmare to arrange for those people to receive corrected versions. In a few days I’ll know for sure about that. Like I said, this is a guinea pig. And thank goodness I’m not paying rent on a storefront, or any up-front manufacturing costs.

But anyway, the best thing to do is quit re-loading my stats, and just get on with more work. Get that whirlpool going. So in that spirit, here I am working on It’s You, on an instrumental for the beginning of the current album, Fr. Hifta Ryphtor (which I should be able to finish in a few months):

It’s not technically an overture, but I noticed today that at about 2:22 the chords kind of hint at Curtis’ Classic Collection of Comforts. So I went ahead and accentuated that. Here’s a (slightly) more “mixed” version of the above — note that I fixed the sloppy timing at the end (God bless digital):

Note also that the first few guitar phrases are gone now, save for some barely audible volume swells.  I never intended for the guitar to come in right at the beginning, but it’s good to play through the whole thing just to get in the flow/mindframe.

In case you’re wondering, yes, there is such a thing as Leave of Absence 1, as well as an early-ish album called Unfinished Business, and I intend to remaster them and make them available as well. I also have a large enough collection of what I’ve been referring to as “orphan tracks” to compile into yet another album, and this morning I had the spectacular idea of naming said compilation Extreme Leftovers. Because, you know, Leave of Absence is technically leftovers, so anything that didn’t make it onto that would be even more “left over”. And far from being lesser-quality material, it would include some of my all time favorites such as Mana and Phone Booth.

So… uh…

…I guess I should “go live”?

My only concern at this point: it needs to be gapless. Most of the songs segue into one another, and if lulu’s disc image puts two-second spaces between my wav files, I will not be happy. Especially if people out there pay for it. I mean, you still would get all the music, regardless, but still. I asked one of lulu’s online support people if gaps would be put in, and their answer, after checking with someone else, was “there shouldn’t be”.

Users of lulu’s service can update their files at any time, and they do allow you to provide a complete disc image as opposed to wav files, so if necessary I could create one and upload that instead… but I’m hoping I don’t have to.

By the way, this is the “announcement” I was referring to in earlier posts, as if you couldn’t tell. In no way does this preclude a timely release of some more current material in the not too distant future, as I’m making great progress on that — but the idea of releasing a CD without putting up cash up front is incredibly appealing, and I think a remastered Leave of Absence 2 is the perfect guinea pig for it. Not to mention, a strong album in its own right.

Stop looking at me like that. It’s just a figure of speech.

Well, should I wield the mighty power of my left mouse button, and hope for the best? I’m kind of a hypocrite, because I wait seven years and change to put it out, and yet I can’t wait a couple weeks to order one for myself and just check it… I expect everyone to be patient except me…

Update 9/30/07: Leave of Absence vol. 2 is available for purchase. You can click on the word “this” in this sentence. No, not the “this” just before the word “sentence”, the one just prior to that one, between “word” and “in” — the one in the quotes. The one that actually looks like a link, you troublemaker. I should just make this entire paragraph one big link, but I like to test your motor skills, hand-eye coordination, and ability to follow instructions. Especially if you’re going to be a wise-ass.

Anyway, the process of self-publishing is not as roll-off-a-log dead easy as you would think, but most of it is a matter of uploading the right files the first time, because you’re spending a lot of time waiting. Waiting for files to upload, waiting for disc images to be generated, and so on. If you’re recording music, and you plan use this sort of service, I recommend you download their cover art templates now and start designing that in your spare time. Even if you don’t publish through the same company, the templates will be useful.

Here’s how my day went today. I started off by putting together my little promo mp3 for my page on their site, which I had to keep shortening and rendering at a lower bitrate to get it down to their 2 MB limit. Then while I was editing that, I had a sudden and terrifying thought: Tracktion, by default, starts new projects with the master fader at negative three decibels. So when I did my assembly project to the already-sweetened files, just to make sure they would be at good relative levels from song to song, I ran off partial renders (from cue point to cue point) with the normalize option turned off. Normalizing would have brought every song up to the maximum volume. I wanted most of them to hit maximum volume, but there are a few that shouldn’t, and since the songs had previously been normalized, I assumed I was “good to go”. (Generally acoustic songs should not hit the same levels as full band songs, or they sound out of proportion.)

So okay, the relative level from song to song was fine, but it dawned on me that after this last step they would probably all be three decibels quieter than they could have been!!! Three decibels is noticeable. It won’t ruin the listenability by itself, but if you have CDs in a changer, you will definitely notice the need to adjust your volume from disc to disc. So I opened up each wav file in Audacity, checked their peak levels to confirm that my concern was well-founded, ran a hard limiter on each song at -3.5 decibels, and then boosted each song by 3.5 decibels. Yes, I used this as an excuse/opportunity to push my stuff another lousy half decibel. Yes, I’m an accomplice to the loudness war. Destroying the artistic integrity of my own work half a decibel at a time.

So, re-uploading all the files took another four hours, but at least that’s just a matter of starting the upload and then wandering around, finding stuff to do, and thinking sane thoughts.

Now that that’s all been taken care of, I recommend you grab a copy! If you’re extremely tight and pinching every penny, just bookmark it. Even if you’re so poor that you’re eating rats, you can at least look at the page, listen to the low-bitrate audio clip, and say, “y’know, for being all ‘remastered’ and whatnot, this sounds an awful lot like a low-bitrate mp3.”

Figure of speech, dude. Okay, not a very common one, I admit it…

Seriously, though, right now your word of mouth is more valuable to me than your ten dollar bill.  If you’ve got it, great (I’m currently back on my bread and tuna diet), but otherwise, any plugs into the public consciousness on your part would be enormously appreciated.

This probably calls for a “so you want” post about finishing stuff. Anyone still reading that?

Two links and a random question

First of all, a couple of links.

Soundsnap is a site where you can upload and download lots of sounds. The terms are that you don’t have to pay for any of them, or even give credit, as long as you’re using them in something and not just redistributing the raw sounds to make money off of them. I signed up for a user account there, and have uploaded three odd sounds that happened to be collecting virtual dust on my hard drive. People actually seem to be downloading them, so it will be interesting one day to hear one of my boings or bleeps in an unexpected context.

Freelance Switch is a blog for people making the jump to freelancing. Notbythehour.com, which is associated with Freelance Switch, features a free PDF book about creating passive income streams. Say no to wage slavery.

Random thought: something that’s been bugging me for years now. A while back, I was browsing through a pamphlet listing “continuing education” type courses available in the area. One course was called something like “How to completely disappear without a trace and not be found by anyone, ever”. Another course was called “How to find absolutely anyone, anywhere in the world, no matter what”. They were both taught by the same instructor. Obviously they both draw from the same pool of concepts. The unavoidable question, keeping me awake every night for years until my brain a-splode, is this: Who wins? Shouldn’t at least one of the courses be subtitled, “unless they took my other course”?

The barbed wire fence stretches on

Apologies to anyone (particularly myself) whose sensibilities are being tested with my recent rant and subsequent follow-ups. Let me make this clear: I’ve never wanted to “rise above you”. I want to take you up there with me. A good thing becomes a bad thing if it’s not in a good place, so I’ve shifted my concern from the work itself to its context, or environment, which has been neglected. The where, as opposed to the what. It’s just hard to discuss this without making a zillion little disclaimers for everyone that’s out to seek and destroy prima donnas.

An angle I still haven’t mentioned with regard to the barbed wire fence of fame (I can’t call it a “wall of fame”, because that has an entirely different meaning — which is fine, because I’m burned out on the “wall” metaphor anyway) is how it impacts our relationship to music itself. Correct me if I’m wrong, but we seem to have a much easier time forming a relationship with music when we don’t have a real relationship with the people who created it. I don’t know why that is; maybe knowing the person kills the mystique. Maybe it’s because we feel safer surrendering ourselves to music when we know it’s in a “fixed” state, because otherwise we’re afraid we might influence it (we don’t trust ourselves). Or maybe it’s simply that fully forming both relationships, to the person and their music, is overkill, and too much for any person to handle. Yet again, maybe all of this was a lot less true when music was live and communal, and didn’t magically spring forth from electronic boxes. In any case, the detachment from the person seems to actually help the music to shine through.

Wouldn’t anonymity help even more, then? Apparently not — even though the artist must remain untouchable, we have to form the internal hallucination of a relationship, a sense that we “know” the artist; but this apparent relationship is just our concept of the artist, which remains entirely under our control. It helps that we can easily overlook his worst characteristics. If we hear that the artist is rotten to his spouse or children, we can write it off as defamation from a vindictive journalist; and then when we hear that the same person has done something noble, we take it as fact. This is a lot harder to do when you live with someone and see that person every day.

What we really want to do with music, whether we’re the creators or just the listeners, is surrender to it. We’re handing ourselves over to it and letting it have its way with us, and this is an extreme act of trust. Otherwise we’re just hearing sound, which is outside of ourselves, and has nothing to do with us.

First reflections on the “fame” post

I need to write this follow-up because I don’t want this site to hang on a downer for too long.

I’m not really retracting what I said. On re-reading it, I do think I covered the bases and backed up the emotional aspect of it with some meaningful analysis, on both ends of the fame-obscurity spectrum. One person’s daring confession is often no big deal to everybody else. It was a little uncomfortable to write, though, and in the end I felt more raw than cleansed. As in, this is something I need to do something about. For real.

What I was most afraid of was that it would sound like I’m begging for attention, and maybe I am. On the other hand, I want to contribute something to the world, and it’s hard for that to happen if the world is already saturated with what I’m offering.

Because my attention is split between not one, not two, but several album projects, it’s a challenge to get any one of them in the can for an official release. (This includes things that were at one point finished, but found their way into the remix queue.) So perhaps instead of waiting until one is finished before submitting it to something like Magnatune, I should put together a relatively quick “best of” type compilation album. The material for it would have to meet two criteria:

• Be really, really, really good.
• Be done. As in, now.

I think this is do-able. Certainly not an enormous investment of time, money, or energy (apart from what’s already been invested, which I’m just “sitting on”). I’ll meditate on possible titles. Something a little more clever than “best of” or “greatest hits”, obviously, but still making it clear that these are windows to a larger pool of material. Of course there are already a shitload of clever titles out there, but either you’re going to be among the clever, or less clever, so you might as well be in the “among” group.

Confronting my arch-nemesis: “fame”

I have mixed feelings about posting this. I know how it could come across. That’s all I’ll say for now…

-

Hello, “fame”. (Asshole.) Stop pretending to be an innocent lamp post. I know you’re there. And I know that you know I’m here. There’s some extremely dysfunctional relationship between you and me, some heavy long-unresolved issue. The very fact that you exist fills me with rage. It disgusts me that I have to write about it, which I hope I only have to do once — and it will disgust me again every time I re-read this.

So according to you, not only will I never be in a league with the Beatles or Led Zeppelin, which is fine, but… here, let’s scale this down gradually: never in a league with King Crimson. Scale down a bit more: never as well known as the late Kevin Gilbert. No, scale down further: never as well known as The Shaggs, or my ex-girlfriend’s husband, or any musician that covers any of the above. Never as famous as Numa Numa kid, Nora the piano-playing cat, or any random person between the ages of 18 and 24 that lights a fart or flashes a tit, however unremarkable said tit (or fart) is. On YouTube, my wild mouse Ralphie gets twice as many hits as any of my original songs, and all he does is twitches his ear and scoots off. (That said, if you go by the total for all four songs, I do whoop his tiny rodent ass. You know what they say about “lies, damn lies, and statistics”.) Here on this site, it’s a good day when I get double-digit page views. If you’re reading this, consider yourself elite.

Several years ago, when mp3.com was the place to promote original music, I received special mention for being in their “bottom ten”. A writer for Spin contacted me to do a short email interview as a result of this, aghast that everyone wasn’t downloading Have You Heard The Good News?, but when I tried to follow up to see if anything became of that, I never heard back from him. You can’t blame me for feeling like there’s a conspiracy.

My claim to fame is my immaculate lack of it.

There’s something psychological going on here. It’s not just the world — it’s me too. On some level, in some way, I am unconsciously doing everything possible to avoid the tiniest shred of exposure. Sure, I make a ton of music available to y’all (though maybe not in a consistent way), including this “open source” blogging, where I take the screws off the bottom of my muse to show you the gears inside. But in some way I sabotage it from there.

It’s not that I do mediocre work. Sure, I’ve been raised to be pessimistic, and told over and over again to disregard my own opinions because everybody thinks they’re good. (To give you some background here, my father doesn’t like attention — he doesn’t even want people to sing “happy birthday” to him — and I think he projects that onto me, or I project it onto myself.) So let’s say for shits and giggles that they’re right, and that only outside opinions matter. Again, confusing, bewildering… when there is feedback, it’s gushingly positive. (Great direct response, just no viral spread.) Other musicians even come to me for help and advice. So, unless that feedback is part of my hallucination, I don’t think I’m delusional about the music being good.

When I look at naturally charismatic rock stars like Paul McCartney or Robert Plant, it seems that part of their talent is the capacity to love complete strangers. They’re not afraid of people, or even annoyed by people — they bask in people. I suppose I could, hypothetically, walk out to the front entrance of my building and somehow form connections with all the people walking by on the street, but that mental image doesn’t click for me.

Then again, you don’t have to love people to become famous. When I look at truly creative acts who managed to pull it off (I hate the phrase “make it” — too much erroneous subtext packed into two little words) without the charisma, like Pink Floyd, I see that there’s a disconnect between what they’re famous for and what they actually did. In Pink Floyd’s case, they may have broken ground in presenting rock as a form of art, but they wouldn’t sell nearly as many records if they weren’t perceived as a “drug band”. So their unwanted association with getting high is their charisma to a lot of people. In a way, this applies to the more charismatic acts too: In Led Zeppelin’s case, the mythological association with Satanism, as well as the romanticizing of substance abuse and sexual recklessness, didn’t hurt. It’s as if you have to be equated with a vice before masses of people will latch on, even if what you do is great.

You could say the Beatles cheated by securing fame first and then pulling out the creative stops — had they kickstarted their career with Strawberry Fields Forever, they would have died a quick death right out of the starting gate — but I don’t think that was planned. Radiohead seemed to follow a similar path, but in a more condensed time frame. Commercial success isn’t always so helpful in facilitating creative growth, but it can happen.

An unhealthy aspect of over-thinking all this, without truly dealing with it, is that I have not truly made peace with the reality of my life, and what seems to be a disproportionate degree of obscurity. A part of me is saying this is unacceptable, and that once it is completely turned around, and I’m “on the map”, I can breathe easy. That part of me is absolutely terrified of the idea that THIS IS JUST HOW IT IS… the end.

By most standards, my life should be more than acceptable to me. I have nice toys, a nice family, I eat every day, I’m not crippled, I’m not homeless, I’m not a hostage, I’m not getting beat up or shot at (although some people tremble with concern that I don’t have or want a television). I should be up to my eyeballs in gratitude.

So there are a lot of questions I need to ask myself:

• What do you really want? Having a vague feeling that your work should be “out there” and “a valid part of what’s going on in the world” is not a clear goal. Would you rather have a million people tossing your stuff on in the background, or five people getting shivers down their backs? Do you have to choose one or the other?
• Do you actually deserve recognition? Just because you do something well does not mean you’re contributing something to the world that it needs. There’s already a ton of good stuff out there, and maybe all you’re doing is funneling it down to fit your personal taste.
• Besides the above, why do you instinctively feel like you just plain should be famous? Why does it feel weird to you when anyone makes you repeat your name? Do you imagine that you were a famous person in a previous life, and are now being punished for abusing your fortune?
• Would anonymity be fine as long as the music was being heard? What about posthumous fame — creating for the audience of the future?
• Since you often say it’s not you-the-person that you want recognition for, but rather the fruits of your labor, is there an aspect of your work that you’re holding back on, something that you haven’t done yet that will make it suddenly “make sense” to everyone? If your music is the marshmallow you’re working too hard on, and you’re neglecting the rest of the s’more, what would the chocolate represent? What about the graham cracker? (Don’t ask.)
• Is there a reason you avoid exposure? Is there a symbolic link between your agoraphobia — fear of going out, literally translated to “fear of the marketplace” — and a fear of marketing? Are you afraid that other people will contaminate your work? It certainly is luxurious that you can still revise your old stuff in privacy — but even if everyone out there had old versions of your songs, would that stop you?
• Do you feel ethical confusion about the deliberate pursuit of an audience? Is it that you want to have one, but insist that “just sort of happen”, because you’re afraid that to make it a priority would force you to compromise some other principle?

If it’s any consolation, even the most famous people are unknown to the majority. A double platinum record reaches less than a third of a tenth of a percent of the global population — for every album sold, at least three thousand people did not buy the album (of course, this comforting rationale backfires if I do the same math on my own stats). Most of my coworkers at my former workplace would never have picked up on any music references I could have made, so I didn’t bother. Likewise, when I’m oblivious to their favorite television shows, I know I’m not the only one. When I was in high school, I felt compelled to evangelize the music I liked, and actually turned quite a few people on to it (and was grateful for other people who did the same for me with their favorite artists). So I felt a responsibility to the already-famous people, keeping their music alive and propagating it. This is not the earmark of a jealous person.

The best I can do at deciphering what my crackly, static-y, early days of radio-ish voice of reason tells me is: “okay, good, you’ve said it, you’ve gotten it out of your system — now quiet your mind and focus on enjoying what you do.” I guess that’s all I can do, because thinking about it just makes me feel immensely powerless and frustrated, just as it would if it were any other topic I had no control over. And while I don’t know exactly what I need, I know that something will make me feel genuinely better about things.

Maybe I’m not alone in this. I’d like to meet more people who have this “problem”. Perhaps we could form a support group — People Who Are Addicted To The Fame They’ve Never Had — with the overt purpose of “getting over it”…

…and the covert purpose of sneaking off from the meeting one day to pull some outrageous publicity stunt.

-

So let’s just say I owe you one neatly wrapped-up ending.

Minors, maths, mixes, and magnatunes

I just had a cup of coffee, cranked King Crimson’s The Power To Believe, and fell fast asleep for most of the duration of the album. Drooled on my pillow, even. (Wow, good thing I didn’t have a glass of warm milk and put on Brahm’s Lullaby, or I’d be dead.) Anyway, as I was nodding off, I thought of a simple musical idea: the next time I want to write a single-line countermelody for any chord progression, for any major chord I’ll focus on the third of the chord, but for any minor chord I will focus on the fifth, so I’m not emphasizing that the chord is minor — just letting the ear and brain do that. It might even be nice to try playing some familiar chord progressions, but leaving the third out on all the minor chords, just to see how well the “minorness” is implied by context and relationship. This seems like an interesting way to make the sad aspect of a bit of music more gentle and subtle.

WARNING: MATH

It also makes sense from a pitch ratio perspective. If you’re trying to keep your pitch ratios simple (consonant), think of this. In a perfectly tuned C major chord — putting aside that our tuning system is actually an imperfect compromise — the ratio of pitches in “C, E, G” is 4:5:6. Simple enough, because a major third (C to E) has a 4:5 ratio, and a minor third (E to G) has a 5:6 ratio.

When you play a minor chord, though, those two intervals are flip-flopped. The minor third is on the bottom and the major third is on top. So in a C minor chord (C, E-flat, G), you have a 5:6 ratio (C to E-flat) first, and then a 4:5 ratio (E-flat to G). To write this as one three-number ratio, you would have to first bump up the ratios to 10:12 and 12:15 respectively, in order to have a common middle number. You can then write it as 10:12:15, but you can’t reduce it any further. Still fairly small numbers in the grand scheme of the cosmos, and still a beautiful chord, but just something to have in your awareness when you find yourself becoming fatigued and “over-minor’d”.

MATH ALERT LIFTED, OK TO BEGIN PAYING ATTENTION AGAIN

So anyway, that list of songs that I needed to rescue is way down (less than ten), and I can feel my spirit being lightened. I’m even having nicer dreams. (I explained to one friend of mine that I’m not just copying folders and files, but actually re-organizing tracks and doing partial mixdowns, because the Cool Edit sessions won’t open in any other application.) When that ordeal INVIGORATING CHALLENGE is over with, my next objective is to finish up Fr. Hifta Ryphtor and try to get that accepted at Magnatune, an unconventional and forward-thinking record label that apparently needs more rock artists. They don’t give you advances, they don’t pay for your recording costs, they don’t give you limo rides; all they do is evaluate the album to make sure it’s not half-assed, and then make it available where it can be searched for and paid for with flexible pricing. Initially it was just (DRM-free) digital downloads and commercial licensing (so your music could be used in advertising and various media), but they’re starting to sell actual physical CDs too.

Some of the best songs on Fr. Hifta Ryphtor don’t have complete lyrics yet, so it looks like I’ll be needing to go into… that place… you know the one…

Sacked!

So you heard it here first, boys and girls: I have officially entered a new phase of my life. Things had gone from “difficult” to “not humanly possible” in my department at Big Company, and what with the ever-increasing cognitive dissonance of clinging to my “get things done” ethic while knowing I was suddenly expected not only to do twice as much work, but also to use entirely new and counter-intuitive procedures, all the while trying to organize twice as much information in a cubicle smaller than a portajohn… all I knew was I had to get the hell out. Period.

In all honesty, when the district manager asked me to leave early on monday and escorted me out the door, I didn’t know why. Sure, I was showing signs of frustration, but all things considered, I thought I’d been keeping it together pretty well. He said he “wasn’t comfortable” with some things I had said, and I wasn’t sure what he meant.

When I got the call from human resources this morning, it finally made sense. It was something I’d done the previous week. Ohhhhh, yeaaaah, that. See, since this “change” first took place, all of my coworkers have been as miserable as me. We’d been taking a real beating, and we felt that we had been lied to about the call volume, and that there was no substantial reason to believe that things would improve. I envisioned us all as pigs in those tiny factory farm crates. I felt like I couldn’t physically stand up without apologizing for it and referring to it as “breaking rank”. When our supervisor sent us a word document on day two, thanking us for the great job we’d been doing, I changed “THANK YOU” to something phonetically similar and sent it to only three people who desperately needed a therapeutic laugh, including one woman who prior to that had been in tears. Only… as I now find out… apparently more than three people saw it.

I was calm, soft-spoken, and direct when I spoke to human resources. I answered her questions neither defiantly nor evasively. The good news is that they are not going to put anything negative on my record or block my unemployment benefits, and I can still use them as a reference. (Actually I think the whole situation is good, but of course the absence of this income does raise a new challenge.)

What it all boils down to is — you can only take so much.

The fallacy of “odds of success”

From a dead-on post by Steve Pavlina:

Often such seekers [of success in any arena] will look for a certain statistic to help them assess the risk: What percentage of people who attempted a similar venture actually succeeded to the degree I’d like to experience? For example, if you want to earn $5000/month as a blogger, your question would be, “What percentage of bloggers who try to generate full-time income actually earn $5000/month or more?” Suppose it’s on the order of 1%. You then interpret your odds of success as the same figure.

What does such a statistic have to do with your personal chance of success? Nothing at all.

To me this is like asking, “What are my odds of success in kung fu?” If you’re committed to becoming a black belt in kung fu and are willing to put in the time and training, you’ll probably do just fine. But if you’ve never studied martial arts and are looking for a fast and easy road to success, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

In many fields you only see a 1% success ratio because the other 99% are merely taking up space. They’re just dabblers, not serious contenders. You’ll often see this 1% figure in fields with a low barrier to entry such as blogging, acting, or music. You’ll find a small percentage of people who are really committed to mastery, but the rest have virtually no hope of notable success.

(Emphasis mine.) This is of what I was trying to convince my friends and family 20 years ago. But that’s neither here nor there, since what good would it do me? It’s myself that I need to re-convince of this. I was right about something — yes, teenagers can be — and in a way I’ve actually been too open to disempowering points of view, at least as far as my outward presentation of myself is concerned. Fortunately I haven’t stopped the actual groundwork at any point in my life, though I may keep a lot of it either hidden from view, or just plain too tangled/incomplete/obscure to understand without any background knowledge. What I need to resuscitate are my above-ground aspirations. Come out of the closet, if you will.

Bottom line, it’s not all an odds game. Not by a long shot (er, no pun intended).

Money, it’s a… medium of exchange for goods and services

How, ideally, should I be making money? With some of the tools I’m coding, and some of the insight that I’ve gained recording and producing music, I certainly have a lot of value to potentially provide to other musicians. I’ve done paid recording sessions for my friends. Independent music sites, such as CD Baby, encourage us to support our fellow artists by purchasing from the same sites that we sell on. The meta-problem is this:

Artists can’t just make money off of other artists.

That would be like a dead-end pyramid scheme — the money has to eventually come from somewhere else, or eventually it would crap out and leave someone with the short end of the already-too-short stick. To survive in the macroeconomy, we have to somehow make money from the non-artists that provide us with boring things like food, shelter, clothing, transportation, and medicine. Right now all those people are buying their media from large companies. We need to appeal to them, not to “support” us, but to see that they need us; we need to be valuable to them.

In other words, if I make a living by providing production and mastering tools for non-corporatized musicians, it’s a finite quantity of money. Sure, it may be enough to even get me through the rest of my life, but it’s still a well being depleted if it somehow doesn’t connect to the rest of civilization somewhere along the line, and ultimately the whole point of this “life” thing isn’t to grab stuff and fuck people over.

Imagine a single poverty-stricken family in an otherwise well-off small-town neighborhood. Imagine this family is resourceful enough that each member sells some goods and services to keep afloat, but they avoid interacting with the rest of the townspeople because there are just too many bad vibes out there. Father sells his goods to daughter, daughter to mother, and mother to son. They “keep it in the family”. It’s clear to see that this family is on the fast lane to eviction. Now pretend they’re all musicians, Flash animators, open source programmers, and video bloggers, and multiply that by a few million.

Enter the the big corporations. You can try to market your talent to them, but then you have to cry every time you see it being used for evil purposes. The good part is that now the financial flow includes your plumber and your dentist, so you know you’re not dooming artistkind to an eternity of leaky pipes and rotting teeth. The bad part is that you’re helping to fill the world with … just go out there and listen, need I say more?

Since these monoliths have crippled their own creative potential (including the potential to embrace new creativity from outside their own tinted-glass doors) by their very nature, we can’t rely on them. But we can’t ignore them either. They know how to connect to Joe Normal, and we need to study how they do this. Keep in mind “Joe Normal” is not the same as “Joe Amoral” — thugs will always be thugs, and we don’t need to sell to them, nor would that be good for the macroeconomy — but we do need to figure out how to show our value to the people out there that provide us with roads, houses, schools, socks, refrigerators … you get the idea.

Leap of faith, get away from the noise

I need to write a little closer to daily, but I think what I’ve written so far has already helped me stay on track. It’s a sort of “leap of faith” that I’m setting out to systematically make this short animated film and break me out of my rut (of just being a musican that can’t manage to hold people’s attention over all the noise, more on that below) — faith in the sense that I have to put in a good stretch of unacknowledged work, stay on a single project (don’t jump around), and basically be in isolation, i.e. no feedback until I’m much much further along and have something impressive to show off. I’m kind of seeing it as going into a long tunnel. But I feel good about it.

I went to House of Guitars today for new bass strings just for Slab. Yeah, I decided to go all out on this remix, cough up the $20 and not just boil my old strings in water a fourth or fifth time. It’s kind of funny, at HoG there is a large cinderblock wall covered end-to-end and top-to-bottom with autographs. A sign in front of it says:

WALL OF ROCK STAR AUTOGRAPHS
DO NOT WRITE ON THIS WALL

I know enough about Aristotelean logic to know that translates into “YOU ARE NOT A ROCK STAR”. And I kind of feel like screaming at everybody there, of course you’re not a rock star, you’re in a sea of noise where no one can hear you. Look at all this noise … you’re putting your flyers up on walls covered with flyers for other bands, putting your CDs in stores where there are thousands of other CDs, submitting them to record companies that get thousands of demos a day, putting your band’s website on an internet with millions of other bands … that’s called noise, don’t you get it? If you want to make a dent in the world, you have to get away from the noise.