I Hate Mornings

I think it must be the curse of my generation¹ that we were promised outlets for our creativity and not given them. God knows why we think we are so entitled, but the curse is evident in the growing number of my friends who have some sort of creative skill, urge or passion, and struggle to find the outlet or audience for it.

Unmarried

Previous generations seem to have been satisfied with THE HOBBY. That’s no good for us. We’re all about THE ART. We demand to earn our living and make our mark as creators. But we are the Peter Pan Generation that doesn’t really dig business, so we’re crap at useful things like self-promotion and networking.

I have friends who are happy with normal jobs. They tend to be the ones who are also married, because marriage is a sign of GIVING UP ON THE DREAM. It’s OK to be with someone for ever, as long as you don’t get married. Because you couldn’t possibly get married until you’ve figured it all out (ie. next year).

So we’re all floating along. We hoped turning 30 might bring a flash of enlightenment. It didn’t. We’ve created a wonderful and free digital world where everyone can have everything and we’ve turned down every opportunity to do things ‘the old way’, because we knew things were going to change.

Revolutionary trinket

And things have changed. Instead of making a trinket for fun, giving it as a gift, being surprised when people want more trinkets, making a few more, maybe setting up a little stall somewhere (always as a hobby – never seriously), selling more, making more and selling more, we think of an idea for a revolutionary trinket design, we register revolutionarytrinket.com, we make a business plan that has a huge question mark by the word FUNDING, we build revolutionarytrinket.com/shop, we set up a hosted Gmail account to deal with the inevitable flood of orders and to streamline team calendaring (there has to be a team), we post a couple of mysterious tweets and we wait.

Nothing happens. We never even get round to making stuff any more. We ignore the voices of THE DRAGONS that float over from the TV: “Malcolm, the best thing you can do is to LET IT GO. This is NOT A BUSINESS, and it will NEVER BE A BUSINESS.” What do they know? They’re old and successful. They didn’t create stuff. They did it the boring way. Little by little. With ice cream trucks and leisure centres and shrink-wrapped toys. What is this? 1982? We’re MAKING ART HERE, PEOPLE. Did you even hear Duncan Banatyne on Desert Island Discs? Worst. Taste. Ever.

What’s the answer?

Crowdsourcing. Crowdfunding. Fundcrowding. Micropatronage. Begging. It’s the new way! It worked for Coming & Crying and, um… there are others. We don’t even need to think about money any more. There are people out there who will just give. We think of a clever name for the second-from-bottom-price-point package² and throw in a personal appearance (OMG! Seriously? You’ll turn up at my house and actually clamp a trinket to my mantelpiece? For only £599?), and the money will come rolling in.

Or not. I think there’s another way. In fact, I know there is because Xander has already thought of it. He just hasn’t built it yet. And while he’s away directing a play in Edinburgh, Miranda and I had a secret meeting (with tea and Co-op Truly Irresistible Stem Ginger Cookies), and planned it all out. When Xander gets back he’ll tell you all about it. It’s going to be amazing. ;)

The Myspace Gig Scraper is a new tool to publish your Myspace gig listings on your website.

I’ve been struggling for quite a while with the problem of synchronising gig listings between websites, and Myspace has always been a sticking point – they don’t provide any easy way of getting the listings in or out of their system.

So I’ve created a small set of scripts that scrapes your Myspace gig listings and displays them on your site (you can see it working on the Little Fish site). You still have to input the gigs on Myspace, but at least you don’t have to duplicate your efforts.

The Myspace Gig Scraper is hosted on GitHub, which means that other muso-geeks can take it and improve it. It’s free for anyone to install on their server and tinker with, but you’ll need a little bit of technical knowledge to get it up and running. I’m hoping to make it easier in the future.

Dogs Running Free is the musical project that Nick Gill, Spencer Walker and I are launching next month. We’re going to spend three days at my parents’ house to write and record some music. Part of the process will be to figure out how to release it. Do we live stream some of it? Maybe make videos instead of just audio tracks. I like the idea of capturing the live performances on video, Pomplamoose style.

The session is happening in September, but I want to put this out there in case any of you musos have done similar projects and might have some cool ideas. Let me explain roughly what we have planned, and then we can talk about it.

Nick, Spence and Ben

Nick, Spence and I have been playing music together on and off since the mid nineties, but in the last five years our musical tastes and styles have diverged. Gone are the days when the three of us would obsess over Queen scores and Ben Folds Five bootlegs, or jam BareNakedLadies tunes before hopping in the Volkswagen camper van and blasting Deep Purple’s Burn out of the tinny speakers. We’ve all grown and matured, and we’ve all been playing music separately for a while now.

Nick has recently been described as “the William Morris of Peckham”. This is probably mostly to do with his love of letterpress printing and bookbinding, but his music reflects the same values of careful hand-crafting, building things from scratch and being intentionally awkward and specialised. Nick’s band The Monroe Transfer, whose latest album was sealed in hand-stitched cloth bags, is a 7-piece instrumental group that creates beautiful, brooding tunes that seem like the soundtrack to a really long, bad day. I mean that in the best possible way. Nick also plays guitar (and more) in Fireworks Night, releases occasional recordings of twinkly noise as Lights and writes music for weird and wonderful plays.

Spence is the drummer in A Silent Film, an epic indie pop/rock group from Oxford who are unexpectedly huge in Portugal and edging onto the alternative charts in the USA. He’s a loud drummer, but also comes up with consistently interesting and difficult beats. He also occasionally plays (in quite a different style) in Jont‘s band, where he’s known as The General because he has a habit of taking charge of rehearsals when tensions are running high. Spence ended up with the good voice in the Walker family genetic lottery of musical talents (along with the double bass skills), and our voices sound otherwise eerily similar.

Since we last played together (on the ill-fated Groove On album, 2000) I’ve been doing a bizarre combination of geek pop comedy songs, tiny songs, 60s covers, Hammond and piano as a sideman and a Beatles cover.

We’re three musicians who know each other very well, but have wildly different musical experiences, taste and ambitions. I think that’s going to make for a very interesting session.

The Project

We don’t want to give ourselves too many boundaries before we start, but I can’t help thinking of interesting ways we can approach the recording and creative boundaries we can use to keep it on track and get it all finished in three days. Here are a few ideas:

1. Limit the recordings to what we can play live: no overdubs.
2. Do the whole session with the same line-up, eg. drums, piano, guitar, vocals
3. Make all the tracks 3 minutes long
4. Make one track for each of the words Dogs Running Free
5. Record short musical ideas instead of long tracks

We’ve been batting ideas back and forth for a couple of months now. We have a collaborative playlist set up on Spotify where we can throw reference tracks so that we don’t have to spend the whole time playing each other new music during the writing process. Nick recorded an insane guitar riff through a home-made fuzz pedal. I sped it up, changed the key and wrote a song on it. Spence spent a 36-hour van trip to Portugal writing an epic track in his head. I wrote half a song called Dogs Running Free. We may not use any of these things, but at least we can hit the ground running.

I would also love to release Dogs Running Free as a series of live videos like this, but I’m not sure I’ll get that idea past the others. Except maybe the sheepskin coat. ;)

I’m quite a technical songwriter. I have methods of writing. I can justify my choices of rhyme, structure and language. I studied songwriting. When I hear songs I analyse them. I see songwriting as a craft (ie. something you can learn and improve with practice).

A lot of songwriters I know don’t see it this way at all. They see songwriting as a pure form of artistic expression that can be ruined by overthinking. They see justification of musical choices as a weakness, as if you’re bowing to the demands of the imagined audience instead of being authentic and true to the soul or emotional message of the song.

It’s difficult to think about this objectively. The fact that I’m even writing this puts me firmly in the thinking camp. A feeling songwriter wouldn’t write about songwriting. They would just write songs. I’m sure a carefully balanced approach is best, but I can’t do that.

So I’m going to be entirely subjective and tell you why I think songwriting needs to be approached as a craft. I hope some of you feelers might be able to help me see your side of the argument.

Songwriting is a craft, not an art

There’s no such thing as a conceptual songwriter. As an artist you are free to choose from all sorts of funky media and part of the game is to work outside the box and provoke thought and criticism. Songwriting isn’t like that. Composition is like that, but songwriting isn’t. As a songwriter you’ve signed up to write songs, and the popular song isn’t a very flexible form. It’s not quite as restrictive as being a sonnetwriter, but it’s closer to that than, say, a novelwriter.

There’s nothing to stop you exploding the confines of the form and writing 15-minute one-chord freeform poetry, but that’s not a song. You could argue that it is, but you’d be wrong (the word song refers to a pretty specific musical form, and let’s assume we’re talking about popular song, even late 20th Century popular song to keep things simple).

Given that you’ve chosen to write in such a specific musical and lyrical form, it makes sense to understand that form as deeply as possible. To study the greats. To analyse and practise and learn, until you can write so fluently that the form becomes transparent to the listener and the message, the emotion, the feeling is transmitted as purely as possible.

As a listener, there are lots of things that can make you aware of the form, and distract you from the message:

• boring bits, where a song goes on too long, repeats too much or is too formless to follow easily
• uncomfortably dissonant moments
• surprising and unprepared musical moves
• embarrassing lyrics, cheesy rhymes and empty clichés
• unnatural turns of phrase
• words wrongly stressed

Any feeling songwriter can point out a bad song. If you can recognise a bad song from a good one, you must know on some level what makes the bad songs bad. And once you know that you can avoid the bad things in your own writing and do more of whatever makes the good songs good. All feeling songwriters do this more or less consciously. So how is there still this idea that thinking about the technicalities of songwriting can ruin the feel of a song?

Are thinker and feeler songs different?

At this point, I imagine a feeler would point out that we’re talking about different kinds of song. I’m talking about heartless, muso, technically brilliant Nashville-style thinker songs, they would say, while they are talking about good, authentic, passionate songs. They may even raise an eyebrow and mention Steely Dan or drop in a quick Beatles/Stones comment.

While it’s true that I’m partial to some ‘classic’ songwriters like Ben Folds, Carole King, even occasionally Neil Diamond, most of the music I listen to and love is good, authentic, passionate music – The Band, Janis Joplin, Hendrix, The Small Faces and all that. And all of this real, true, passionate music is played over carefully crafted song forms.

Songs and recordings are not the same thing

If I were a feeler reading this, I’d probably start listing great tracks that have almost no song structure. There are loads. So I think it’s important to remember that we’re talking about songs here, not recordings. There’s a track on the Ben Folds Five demos and outtakes album Naked Baby Photos called For Those Of Ya’ll Who Wear Fannie Packs that’s just a recording of them jamming Rage Against the Machine in soundcheck. It’s a great recording, and I used to listen to it all the time, but it’s not a good song. At all.

Maybe that’s the answer. Good songs require thinking, and good recordings are about feeling. Does that ring true to any of you feelers? Or am I overthinking the whole issue? ;)

The Internet is all about writing. Writing that inspires and excites, writing that informs and educates, writing in tags that make the web work, writing in 140 characters. Whatever you do in real life, it’s going to be represented on the web in writing. Yes, images and videos are important too, but they’re the cheese slice and gherkin on the Internet burger.

Coming and Crying

Today I woke up to find an email from Meaghan in my inbox. It wasn’t just to me – it was an update to all the supporters of Coming and Crying, one of the most amazing webby/creative projects around.

Meaghan works at Tumblr and I met her on the Man (hat on) tour, when I played the Tumblr office in New York. She and Melissa, both writers, have put together a book of short stories about sex. They have funded it through Kickstarter and have been documenting the whole process in blogs, on Twitter and in emails. They have had live events like the intimate readings and the latest listening session, where authors and supporters gathered to listen to studio recordings of the stories.

The update email is only for supporters (we paid for the inbox love ;), so I won’t reprint it all (there are plenty of public updates too), but here are a couple of excerpts to give you a taste:

I’m not gonna lie to you guys, because you are my safe space: writing a story that is in a BOOK with your name on it, while managing the production of a book, while working fulltime and trying to find a place to live is A RECIPE FOR CRYING TO YOUR MOTHER.

Having the book back meant one very specific, wonderful thing, and that is that while I was moving (I strongly advise anyone who is considering making a book and moving into an apartment at the same time to RECONSIDER), Melissa printed the whole thing out in a fancy Kinko’s way that costs more than an actual book. Which means that for the past 10 days or so I have been walking around town, hugging an actual physical object to my body, flipping through it, reading little pieces of it, and realizing just how goddamn good this thing we all decided to fucking go for really is.

When I first read about the C&C project on Meaghan’s blog, I signed up and handed over my money almost immediately. I hadn’t read the stories yet. Many of them hadn’t been written. They hadn’t started to make the actual book. They didn’t even know how. None of this mattered. I wanted it to succeed, and I wanted to be a part of it. And I wasn’t the only one. They raised about $5,000 in three days, completely smashing their Kickstarter target. The total donations are now $17,243.

Writing

The success of the venture rests on Meaghan’s writing. Coming and Crying is very cool, but the idea isn’t unique. There are loads of worthwhile and interesting art projects going on around the Internet, and Kickstarter is packed full of ideas. Meaghan’s Tumblr blog was popular way before she starting working for Tumblr (back when she was Jonathan Coulton‘s Scarface) because it’s such a satisfying read. She comes across as honest, funny and likeable (which she is). When she writes an email to the mailing list of supporters they are inspired and excited.

We managed a tiny version of this with the Little Fish Paper Club last week. We made something personal and handmade and sent it out in handwritten envelopes to 100 people. It was beautifully designed by Bekim Mala and it arrived in the post like a present, but at its core was a piece of writing by Juju that was inspiring and exciting. When the Fishy Paper Squares arrived on Monday people were posting thank you messages and pictures on Facebook and Twitter, and thirty more people signed up for the next edition.

Juju’s story was based around the song Am I Crazy?, but that’s not what made it work. People want to connect with Juju. They can do it through the music, but on the web it’s through writing that the connections are really made. The constant conversations on Twitter and Facebook, the blog posts, the emails, the comments. It doesn’t always have to be about the music.

Band newsletters

I unsubscribed from most band newsletters ages ago because they tend to be SERIOUSLY DULL. Now I mostly just get updates from the bands I play with. But I had a dig through the email archive for some examples of good and bad writing and came up with a few. I’ve vaguely anonymised the quotes. Let’s see if any of them are as inspiring as Meaghan’s C&C email:

Keen for something completely different?

XXX and I have collaborated on a new album, Odd Frost, downloadable at this link…

And if you’re around XXX on XXX, we’ll be launching at XXX with a performance bash. Please see the ‘Nightvisions’ section of the theatre’s newsletter below.

Thanks much for your time and consideration!

Hmm… How about this?:

Goodevening everyone, i do hope that this finds you all keeping warm and well.

I am very happy to say that we will be mastering our second album in the very near future after which we will reveal plans for its release…. exciting times indeed… and there is more good news as well in the form of a very talented keyboard player who will be joining us for our show this sunday evening. So do try and make it down to the XXX for the XXX. It promises to be great evening.

I don’t mean to be mean. I’m just as bad sometimes. But you get the idea, right? Not very inspiring.

Musicians, get writing!

If you’re a musician, you need to write for the Internet all the time. Not only blogs, Myspace updates and Facebook messages, but also meta information for MP3s, Bandcamp track descriptions, Twitter biographies, interviews and endless ‘about the band’ copy. So aspire to make it great. Not just interesting, but inspiring and exciting. Don’t make people sit through any more ‘Hi, it’s me. I played a gig. Buy my album.’ emails. Brighten up their day with some great writing. And it’s not compulsory, but ending a sentence in uppercase can often make it AWESOME. ;)