Tag Archives: recording

Where Can Creative People Afford to Live? (Part 2)

meanwhile in oakland
One of the most popular posts on this blog, by far, is Where Can Creative People Afford to Live These Days?

I’ve been meaning to get back to that one, as I’ve struggled with this quandary myself for years. Just today, I was ranting to someone about how I hate having to work a day job, that our society is set up so that I can’t afford to pursue what I love to do. And then the voices come into my head of other people who say, “That’s just the way it is.” Well, screw the way it is. I’m gonna find a way to be a fully self-supporting artist without having to work for someone else in a rote schedule, mark my words.

So where can creative people afford to live? Have I found any solutions? Well. I’m not certain you want to follow my route. I broke up with my husband and moved to a Victorian flat with two roommates in Oakland. I live in a nice neighborhood where I feel safe. Oakland is an awesome place to be right now. I’m surrounded by musicians and artists and writers and beautiful weirdos of all kinds. There’s always something to do, always a show to go to, a coffee shop to write in, a restaurant to eat at, a hill to hike. My rent is under 400. I live on about 1,000 a month. I ride my bike, I have a budget for groceries and gas (mainly I use the car only to get to work). I have a good friend who has kept his rent around 400/month too, he lives in a warehouse room with a loft. There’s a pipe over the bed, and the bathroom is down the hall, but he’s able to go tour in Europe for six weeks out of the year and record in LA for a month without losing his music clients (he teaches lessons) or his place to live.

It’s a lot about who you know, too. I got my place because a friend had lived there. My friend got his warehouse place because he knows the owner of the building. So there is always that to consider.

Is my current situation ideal? It’s better than it was. Sure, there’s guilt for not being a conformist member of society, for not forcing a broken marriage to work, for pursuing my dreams. And I may have to live predominately on potatoes the rest of my life, however long or short that is, but I’m trying not to think about that.

But aside from that useless emotion, when I look at the bottom line, I’m in business for myself and music/writing come first. With writing, it’s easy to work it around a day job. With music, not so much. There’s touring and recording in the studio and all of that.  Day jobs that have a set schedule and health insurance and permanency, like the one I have at the library, are not drop and run types of jobs where you can be like, “Yea, I need to go on tour in June, can I have six weeks off?” Nope. So I haven’t quite find a total solution to my current dilemma which is, there will definitely be studio recording coming up and touring, but I don’t know how much, how long, or when exactly, and I have a set schedule at the library that is not flexible, except with long term planning and enough vacation time. I am not sure what I’m going to do to accomodate my music/writing come first goals without starving to death (yet), but I imagine I will figure something out.

As it stands, I’m exploring my options, but I’m feeling a bit stuck. OK, a lot stuck. I’ve been able to work my local performances and freelance jobs around the library schedule so far, which is four days a week. But nothing as big as what’s ahead. There’s the option of asking to be a permanent intermittent employee, which is basically someone who substitutes around the county at different libraries. That would give me some more schedule freedom ideally, but you can’t pick really what’s going to be available or open and sometimes it’s a crap shoot. And no health insurance. The only other job options I can think of are bartending, waitressing, the same old drill. Which I’m down to do if I need to, though I wouldn’t necessarily love either.

In a perfect world, or my ideal world, I would continue to develop the community of artists, writers and musicians I have around me and we would help each other out with sublets, jobs, shared dinners, essentially be a total community for each other. It’s happening more and more for me lately, the human network, and I’m really happy with it, but it’s still a total struggle. Living alone as an artist seems to be more manageable to me than trying to live with a partner, but maybe someday that will happen again, too. I don’t know.

So maybe my next post will revisit what jobs artists can do that won’t detract from their ability to pursue art, because that seems to be what I ended up talking about here, aside from my current sitch and how I’m trying to pin down a set schedule for upcoming recording/tour so I can decide whether to jump or keep my feet put.

Why I Write This Damn Blog

I write this blog for both altruistic and narcissistic reasons. I want to help others. I also want to help myself.

Mostly, I write it because in spite of being born to artistic kin, I still struggled for many years with being true to my own artistic abilities and actually believing in them. Took me much longer than others around me. I was surrounded by prodigies and success stories and always felt behind and slow and why couldn’t anyone else see my secret hidden talents. The main reason? Because I didn’t share them. And I wanted it all NOW. I have never been a patient one.

It’s the little things that get us through. I was telling a friend whom I love dearly the other day that if I died tomorrow, I would be happy I’ve lived the life I lived up to now, that I’ve gotten to experience the things I’ve got to experience.

“I don’t even know what my path is,” I said, “but I enjoy the little things.”

“You’re happier than most people,” said my friend.

That comment has been sitting with me. Because I am pretty happy. Sometimes I have to work on playing victim and being moody and a little cynical and jaded, but in general, I have more happy moments than not ever since I stopped seeking solace in unsustainable things like jobs and drugs and other people. Not that other people don’t make my world go round. They do. But now, I’m learning to let go of expectations in a way I’ve never had to before.

I was kinda bitching on Twitter about what the point of continuing to write this blog is. It’s so unpredictable. I get traffic every day, which is good, but not a lot of interaction and I often don’t know that I am actually affecting anyone outside of a handful of people who are very awesome for continuing to subscribe and read this. A guy who discovered my blog about a month ago responded that since he had found my blog he had gotten himself together, joined a band and had a great first show.

Kinda made my day.

I was talking to a friend about that, how I keep writing this thing, trying to connect to this quantum wavelength out there even though I get little feedback on if what I’m doing is working. I’m trying to connect with this unseen consciousness through my art. I write this because I actively believe in something bigger than all of us, something that connects us together, be it particles or light or shards of glass, I dunno, whatever. So what I am trying to do is tap into that thing that defies all the constructs and logic of structured society and the illusion of what is physically here in front of us. I don’t care about the material things, the money, the conventions. I want to transcend what appears to be real and probably isn’t.

Sure, I have some structures in place in my own life to keep me from getting into trouble, but in my mind, and in my own weird way, I am trying to defy preconceived constructs by channeling my energy and art into something bigger so that it can fulfill the role I think it’s meant to fulfill. When I take an emotion or an experience and put it into my music, it’s not a passive thing. It’s a conscious effort on my part to take one little human person’s experience and throw it out into the universe, magnify it, and to ask the universe to make it matter somehow, whether to another person or merely to myself.

I know, I sound like a pagan or a punk or a hippy. Whatever. Maybe I’m all of those things. And none of those things.

I know why I’m here–to help other people with their art and path. That’s the meaning I have ascribed to my life. I have friends who feel the same about their path. So when I happen to affect one or two people, it keeps me going. I do this blog and music and writing thing because I feel compelled to do it no matter what little I get back. But every time I hear that I’ve actually helped someone with their own art, it makes me super happy. Because I needed to read something like this when I was struggling the hardest, and I couldn’t find it, I decided to write it for myself and others. Fuck it.

***

When I did that recording in front of a bunch of high school students a few months back, one of the girls was inspired by my songs, because they weren’t conventional. She thought, “Hey, I can do this too.” She’d been depressed with her own path, wanted to do music but didn’t know what to do or how to do it. When she came and took that class at the recording studio she decided to pursue her music and ended up taking a consultation to figure out how to push forward. And she’s doing this as a teenager, already light years ahead of me. It’s great! Sometimes, because you didn’t “succeed” in your own life how you thought you were supposed to, you can take those experiences and turn them around to help others get forward where you didn’t know how.

It’s not just about ourselves. In this narcissistic American culture we tend to focus on only ourselves as the bottom line, but if you think ahead, we are affecting things in tiny little ways and helping or hindering future generations, not merely our own little lives and worlds.

Night of the Wolf Bear

I promised I would update this blog Mondays and Thursdays. I’m sure most of you don’t even remember me saying that, but here it is, Tuesday. Fail.

I deserve to be shamed like this cow for neglecting my blog.

Also, I’ve been trying to read other people’s blogs out there and am realizing how much talking about yourself and expecting other people to read it gets old, so I try to update when I have something to share from my personal experience that you can either relate to or gives you some sort of morale boost about your own artistic journey. It is my last desire to bore any of you subscribing to this. If you wake up and get an email from The Stifled Artist and think, “Oh. My. God. Kyrsten is talking AGAIN, somebody shoot her, please! I’m tired of the inside of her head,” You are actually often in good company. I get tired of the inside of my head, too.

This past Sunday was interesting. As most of you who have been following for a while know, I recently split with my husband of 9 years due to a mutual agreement between us both, and moved back to Oakland to continue to immerse myself in music and writing in an environment that is filled with both musicians and writers.

I was talking in the last post how a friend of a friend started helping with recording some of my songs, so he can use the project in the portfolio he’s building. We put down bass and vocals over the guitar and drums we had done last time, and the songs sound a lot like I’ve been picturing them in my head for years. He did everything so effortlessly, and the dude is twenty years old. I’m still kind of sitting here with a dropped jaw at his abilities. He’s going to go places.

That’s Jason, adding a bass line I wrote to one of my songs, since I didn’t have a left-handed bass with me.

Sunday we were working on day number two of recording. We worked for about seven hours straight, fixing some drums and guitar, getting vocals and bass recorded. Then, sadly, because I could have kept going for hours, I had to pick up my friend, a pottery artist, to go out to see my parents in the ‘burbs for an informal Thanksgiving dinner.

We arrived about an hour late, (I had told my family I was still recording) and I came in with my military boots, black hoodie and fingerless gloves to a table of about fourteen people, most of whom I didn’t know, but they all seemed pretty nice and there was plenty of food left. My sister had drawn an animal on a piece of paper and put one on each plate. Apparently, everyone had to choose an animal, because later we would share about why we chose that animal. I ended up with a turkey. My friend ended up with what looked like a wolf bear. After dinner we all talked about our chosen animal.

But that’s another story. As I told my artist friend whom I dragged along, “My family is a bunch of wacky artist weirdo’s.”

After dinner, my mom asked me to play guitar for her guests. She had a Bose speaker system for me to hook my guitar through. I hemmed and hawed a bit, as I’d just been recording all day and the previous Wednesday, and the thought of playing my songs on electric for a crowd of dancers and sailors, friends of my mom and her dance partner, who had gathered for dinner, made me more nervous than playing a show in front of 100 people or so a couple of months earlier ever did.

I’ve mentioned on here that growing up, I was known as “the daughter of” my dad the concert pianist. Everyone in our little vicinity seemed to know who my dad was. While he played concerts, I locked myself in my room with my guitar. I didn’t share my songs with my parents very often. Sometimes I walked around town and played for my friends, or when my friends came over, they would try to talk to me and I would space out on guitar, so they would call me a narcissist. Well, only one friend, Cami, called me a narcissist, but that’s OK. She felt ignored.

But as per usual, I digress. My dad was the star. He’s amazing at piano and my parents loved to entertain while I was growing up. We often had this rotating group of eccentrics coming in and out of the house. There was singing and recording and show songs. Every family gathering was, “Kendall, can you play the piano for us?”

And I always wished someone would ask me to play something. But this time, I wasn’t too stoked to be asked to play, if only because I didn’t have my acoustic and as I said before I played two songs, “You might want to take out some razor blades to use while you listen to my songs. They’re a little depressing.”

There’s nothing like being around family to take you from confident 31-year old grown up to being a teenager again. I perform in front of people a lot, but I felt like this was the worst performance I’d done in a minute, mostly because I assumed the people gathered wouldn’t like my songs, that they would be like forcing people who are into Phantom of the Opera and Joni Mitchell to listen to Black Sabbath or Ministry. Not that I sound like Black Sabbath or Ministry while “unplugged”, but the sentiment is there. And if the audience doesn’t feel right, or receptive, it’s hard to channel that gut performance. Plus, shit. It was my FAMILY. I’m sitting there singing about broken, abusive relationships and my dad is there on the couch trying to interpret my lyrics.

So I left feeling like I was thirteen again, but at least I tried. My dad told me afterwards that he wished he had been able to hear my lyrics. And my mom told me as I was leaving, “You don’t even know what you have,” after her friend complimented my songs. I felt like some of the friends were like, “Oh, those songs are nice, dear,” but it was that typical way you feel when a performance just falls flat, when you’re unprepared. Thanksgiving is a time for show tunes and upbeat songs, not songs that make you want to sit in a dark hole and cry, or punch things, or just go nuts. My songs, on purpose, are the latter. So there’s a matter of audience. I felt much more comfortable playing my songs at the recording house I was at Sunday with a buncha twenty-somethings who listen to thrash and doom metal and don’t even blink when I get all sinister in my vocals, but commend it and think it’s hella cool.

My dad later texted me and said he’d wished he had better equipment for me to play through. I remember growing up, how I’d try to play music in the car, rock music, and he would always turn it off, or down, or cringe. I learned to not play anything too intense around him.

Dad and daughter

As he sat as his piano the night of the dinner, he told me he wanted to hear some of my songs, and I told him they might be a little heavy for him. He said he didn’t mind, but I still imagine my dad putting my songs in the stereo and cringing because they’re too intense, too emotional. Granted, he listened to a wacky project I was doing with an electronic musician complete with all sorts of crazy effects at a recording studio session we did for a bunch of high school students and told me it was “nice,” and Rachmaninoff was a constant on the piano growing up, but…

The point of this post is, no matter how old you are, around your parents, you are still that teenager locking herself in the bedroom, trying to play guitar really quietly so they don’t hear what you’re saying. It’s hard to break, and it was like going from one universe to the next on Sunday. But I have to say, I’m getting much better at being myself in whatever universe I’m in, not apologizing for the content I choose to work on.

Happy Thanksgiving, readers. If you get the itch, share your art with your family when you’re with them. It will certainly keep you on your toes.

The Universe Makes Plans Behind Our Backs

I was talking with a musician friend who is helping me record some songs for a project yesterday, in between recording tracks. He told me the best advice he got, ever, was to not give up.

The musician was lamenting the fact that he and his band were about to put out a 7” LP when his car got stolen, two of his band mates got evicted, one got fired and he lost a bunch of shifts at work due to lack of car, setting them back a few months on their project.

“Sometimes the universe really fucks with musicians,” I said. “It’s like it doesn’t want us to succeed. Everything falls apart all at once.”

“It tests us to see if we’re really committed,” he said, and I nodded. Then he told me he had learned to never give up, because if you give up, you’ve already lost, and most people do give up. If you don’t give up, you’re already farther along than all of the people who do. I told him I’d had a similar sentiment recently, where I recommitted to myself to never give up. If four musicians don’t work out, try 100. I have to be that determined.

Every step of this process I’ve been in for the past two years, which is simply working to record a good demo of my songs, something I would want to listen to, so that I can show it to other musicians and collaborate on forming a band, I’ve learned something. There’s no good or bad in the bands I’ve tried out for that didn’t work out, the friends I’ve worked with on projects I’ve put on hold because I had other ideas, the musicians I’ve met up and jammed with (and it’s been a slew) in the past year who ended up drifting off due to me or them not feeling it.

I used to take that shit so personally, when things didn’t work out, but now I think about it and go, “There will be other different opportunities.”

The universe watches out for us, and it hell of tests us to make sure we are willing to go to any lengths to achieve our goals. It was so easy for me when I was twenty to just give up and decide no one GOT me, oh, I’m so sad and it’s just tragic and I’m going to play guitar in my closet from now on.

This time, I’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. Sure, I’ve had my times of wanting to give up, and I’ve been jealous, comparing myself to others, but usually I’m comparing skills I haven’t even worked on.

It’s not right for me to be jealous of someone who has practiced piano their whole life and is amazing at it (like my father) when I’ve not practiced piano consistently for years. We all can’t be good at EVERYTHING, and you have to prioritize what really matters to you. To me, I have a killer voice, and I love to sing and write lyrics and play rhythm guitar, so that is what I have focused on for the past number of years.

I always beat myself up for not being an amazing lead guitarist, drummer and pianist as well as a rhythm guitarist, songwriter, and vocalist, but then I realize that a lot of people can’t even play guitar and sing at the same time. We take for granted our gifts, always comparing, always looking at other people’s highlight reels when they’re got a million behind-the-scenes failures and challenges we will never learn about because they don’t really want to remember it.

I met the musician dude I’m working on some songs with right now randomly one day when I was bummed a potential collaboration didn’t work out. I was sitting outside my friend’s house talking about wanting to give up on music, it’s too hard, waah. Then I heard this amazing doom metal music coming out of a house across the street.

“Who is that?” I asked her.

“Oh, that’s my neighbor! He records bands in his house. Want to meet him?” She introduced me and I asked if he would help me record some songs and he said yes and here were are. I had a great day working on songs, he played drums for me and got some good, dark, dissonant rough recordings down. And then the doom metal musicians, all guys in their early twenties, came in to rehearse and complimented my vocals as I complimented their drumming, guitar playing and shredding styles, and I realized, “Wow. I’m in a room full of talented musicians.”

It made me feel grateful.

Universe is trippy. While I’m over here searching for what I think is best and craving the people who I want to pick from the limited pool of people and experiences I’m aware of, the universe is over there procuring an even better scenario, probably laughing at me a bit for tripping out so much that the people and ideas I want to work with aren’t working out, chuckling to itself as I get all emo and sullen trying to fit myself into a doorway that is too small, dunking myself in a tiny kiddie pool when there’s an entire ocean of possibility out there.

It’s all about trust, and it’s hard to trust a force you don’t know personally but can feel sometimes when the stars and planets align or whatever random thing controls where destiny meets hard work. But when you’re tapped in, BOOM. If you pay attention—and paying attention is the key–all of a sudden people and things come into your life you never could have imagined for yourself. All your best laid plans and desires didn’t even compare. Usually, for whatever reason, this only happens after a long test of patience, some darkness and many failed attempts.

Musicians and Depression

(photo credit: bleu man)

An article in the Guardian put it best: “Often, what makes an artist great is the fact that they’re born with a skin too few.” Many artistic people are born with too little protective barrier between them and the world. Depression, whether in passing or ongoing, is a problem for many.

When I was around 23, I had just gotten out of a dark period of my life. I stopped playing music, not knowing where to go with it anymore. I gave up for a few years, as I worked at a call center for a legal company, earning and spending money, getting through the days one at a time.

When I started playing again in my apartment in the Inner Richmond of San Francisco, I literally played my guitar in the closet, so that the neighbors wouldn’t hear me. Sometimes I just played a little piece of a song I was writing over and over again, some three-chord progression coupled with a wistful lament.

As time went on, I got back to playing in much of my spare time, but I still didn’t play for many other people in person. I couldn’t stand sharing what I was writing about live, in front of someone who might judge me, or worse, talk over.

I kept thinking about sitting in the park with a group of ruffian friends when I was 15. I decided to break out my guitar. “I’m going to play a few songs,” I said. “She plays guitar?” they said. And when I played, they kept talking. It’s funny how a trivial event like this can become your excuse to not ever try. I did play for other people in the years up until I was 20, giving people demos and playing at house parties, coffee shops and in music classes at a college I attended. But at some point, I just gave up.

You can say I have a thin skin. Sometimes I think I’m just a bundle of raw nerves walking around.

Pretty soon, after starting to play in my closet, my husband came home from work and saw our neighbor sitting on the steps in the hallway, listening.

“I love your wife’s music,” he said. “What kind of music is she playing?” My husband was flummoxed. He hadn’t even known I wrote music. He knew my dad was a pianist, that I had dated some musician once. He knew I had a couple of guitars. We had been married for over a year, and I had simply excised one of the most important parts of who I was from my personality and failed to share it with him. Before the dark times, music had been my very modus operandi. Now it was something I did in the closet.

I still struggle with depression when it comes to music in the form of where am I going to go with it. The music industry is definitely changed, and something new is emerging, but I’m not sure where I fit in the scheme, or if I have to create something new myself.

I set up some studio time, for two weeks from now, and I’m going to record four songs I’ve been working on.

Mental Health counselor, Deborah Legge, PhD, said in Digital Music News, “Depression is not uncommon to those who are drawn to work in the arts, and then the lifestyle contributes to it.” When I think of all of the musicians who offed themselves because the lifestyle that came with the music (drugs, touring, sycophants, lack of money, too much money) was just too much, I get bummed too.

What I love is recording. I love to give my music to other people to listen to in their own quiet moments, on headphones or in the car. That’s where I listen to music. Alone.

I am also afraid of success. I don’t like putting myself out there, in person, in front of people, whether through my writing or through my music. I’m still getting used to this part. When I get up on stage these days, just me, no drugs, no barriers, I have these odd quirks that happen. Suddenly I can’t tune my guitar, though I’ve been doing it for 17 years. Then my leg starts twitching. My voice gets wonky. I mean, what the hell?

On the flip side, though, if there is anything that I feel like I am here to do with this life, music is one of those things. When I create music, I am in the moment. Everything else fades away and I feel like maybe I do have a purpose. It’s the semantics of getting my music out there that makes me balk. Collaborating with other musicians freaks me out, based on past experience.

In “Janis Joplin: Rise up Singing,” Sam Andrew of Big Brother and the Holding Company said, “Janis was one of the most powerful people I have ever known, and yet she was completely insecure at the same time. She was the Queen of the Scene and the chambermaid, simultaneously.”

He goes on to describe how she constantly questioned whether she was good or not after performances, wondered always if people liked her, if he liked her, even. “From a person as talented as Janis was, such questions could be unnerving. Her talent was so obvious, but often she couldn’t see it herself.”

And then he says what I feel is the most important part, “People discount what they do best, because they think, ‘Well hey, this is easy, anybody can do this, so what’s so special?’ Janis made me realize that what we do best, all of us, is natural to us, and easy to take for granted. This is completely understandable, and yet it is important for each of us to appreciate our natural gifts, and take pride in them.”

That inspires me. I think I’m alright. I like what I’m doing. I subscribe to a happiness-is-where-you-are mentality, knowing full well that the mountain I am climbing now is probably no better than the mountain I will be climbing later. Something else, something better, never really comes. Everyone, everywhere, is just where they are.

Said Brad Warner in his book “Hardcore Zen: “Every single human being in the world thinks that ‘if only’ this or that one of our conditions could be met than we’d be happy. ‘If only I had a girlfriend/boyfriend/million bucks, then I’d be happy,’ … An old Chinese Zen master once said, ‘From birth to death, it’s just like this!’ Wherever you go in the world, it’s pretty much the same. Only the details are different … We always want to believe that somewhere there’s a perfect situation, if only we weren’t barred from it. But that’s not the reality.”

The reality is that we can always look back and say, “It was better then.” We can always look ahead and say, “It will be better when I’m more successful with my music/writing/relationships etc.” But in the end, what you do right now is probably the most important thing thing you’ll ever do, whether it’s cooking dinner or playing your guitar for your friends.

Whether depression comes with the turf or not, I’ll take it for what it is. It’s definitely not going to stop me from enjoying creating music and learning to share it more with others, even to the point of collaboration. It may just be part and parcel. With great blessings come greater responsibilities. Facing my giant bunny fears, one by one.

Recording the Muse.

“Feels like loneliness and loneliness is fine…”

-Loneliness is Fine/VAST

I think I have a whole slew of songs waiting to be written. I had an idea on the way to work today, and it left, of course, because I didn’t have a tape recorder. Need one of those. Sure, I’ll look like a nut recording myself walking down the street, but you can’t predict when inspiration is going to strike.

Usually, it’s during a time of deep dissatisfaction.

I think I know why my ex never listened to other people’s music. He had this habit of ejecting tapes or turning the volume down. He didn’t want other musicians crowding out his ideas, maybe. You can have an idea, and if you don’t write it down, or better yet, record it, it’s gone.

Just like when I got home today, put together a new song, with five parts, found a part I really like, and wrote it all down, and it’s still fleeting.

I remember something about Green Day. In some article years ago they were saying they never record their rehearsals. (Or never did back then.) They said that if it were good enough to remember, they’d remember it the next day.

I’ve agreed with that pretty much since then. If it’s good, it will stick in your head. You’ll remember it.

Death to the Old Systems

I stay up late thinking of all sorts of things to write about. But of course, now that I’ve been awakened by a lawnmower, a leaf blower and a vomiting dog who needed to poo, my grand schemes seem to have eluded me.

Do I want to work for or in? I’d love to infiltrate a book publisher to see how everything works, as I’m obviously not in some type of submitting frenzy – it seems I am caught up in this whole needing to work to be productive thing. Because I don’t get paid for my writing, my music or anything creative.

Creative has become a corporate shark buzz word. “creative” fields and “creative” jobs. Think advertising. Product adverts. PR and marketing. Creative as a word has kind of lost its meaning in modern day lingo. Creative. Artistic. Artist. Don’t these things have a more organic ( and not as in produce) meaning? Being an artist now means “garnering a buzz”, “taking initiative”, sausage-mongering.

Ok, I made that last one up, but maybe I’m just sick of the sell sell sell produce produce produce aspect of “making it”. We all know musicians who have been pressured into one album too many, lost their voice, and sold us some sort of washed-down faceless version of their former self. I always say that the music industry reels you in and spits you out. It has already been said that the whole system is a dinosaur, practically useless at this point because of the Internet and its myriad methods for reaching out to your niche. That’s why we should buy merch, tickets and the like but not put a dime to the outdated outsourced dinosaurs.

But wait. Who’s going to produce and market the music? Oh ya. We can do that ourselves now. The artist can get directly to its audience with the help of home studios, Internet download, networking sites, and maybe a geek web-savvy friend or two. Sounds east, doesn’t it. Too easy.

So why aren’t I doing this? Good question. I don’t know what a want. The concept of fans gives me the heebies. Minor quirks. Its much more organic for me to write about what I see for the sheer pleasure of writing.

My hand is falling asleep from holding my phone and trying to type with its “smart” keys. I thinks that’s my signal to wrap this puppy up. It sounds like lawnmower man is on his way out.