I Hate Mornings

I’ve been thinking about my quest to define the ultimate band website. It’s a huge topic, so let’s break it down. First up, gigs online: listings, tickets, RSVPs, sharing, feeds…

What are the choices?

• Facebook events
• Myspace gigs
• Upcoming
• Eventful
• Twitter tools like Twtvite and Schmap
• Hand-rolled (eg. Wordpress plugin)

Facebook

Facebook events seems like a good place to start. The way Facebook handles events is great (mostly). It’s tempting to just use Facebook events and embed widgets everywhere else. But it’s not open. Facebook event listings are usually publicly accessible and show up in Google listings, but you need a Facebook account to interact.

Myspace

Unsurprisingly, Myspace gigs gig listings are shit. They look messy, they are annoying to update, you can’t share them easily and they don’t link in with anything useful. Also unsurprisingly, they are the most commonly used gig listings ever.

Upcoming

Upcoming is an event listing site that’s really clever about using hcal, RSS, Flickr machine tags, and other geeky stuff. It’s close to perfect as a solution for the online gig conundrum but non-geeks probably won’t use it, so we would need to feed listings from Upcoming out to other, more familiar, services.

Eventful

Eventful is pretty similar to Upcoming, but maybe not quite as slick. It seems to be a little more US-centric too. On the other hand, it has the “request a band to play in your town” feature, which is what Jonathan Coulton used to plan his early tours.

Twitter tools

Twtvite, Schmap and the rest are great single-use web apps. If your entire audience is on Twitter they are perfect. If not, they will only ever be part of the answer.

In the context of Twitter, I reckon you could do some great stuff with these tools. Something like Schmap is a lightweight layer between the ephemera of Twitter and the static info page. There’s a map built in for instant geographical context, a simple one-click RSVP, a short decsription, a single image and a link to a page with more info. For the Twitter part of the solution you could do a lot worse.

Hand-rolled

There are some good Wordpress plugins and modules for other CMSs that let you post gig listings and make them look cool, link to ticket shops and so on. The problem with all of them is that they restrict the listings to your site. Great for fans, but not for everyone else. How many people look at your site to see who’s playing at their local venue?

The secret weapon

There’s a site called ArtistData that lets you update loads of services at once. You enter the gig details once and they get synced to Myspace, Facebook, etc. We still need to figure out where best to put the listings, but ArtistData will come in handy.

How do we put them together?

Let’s get technical. What are the fixed points?

1. We can’t ignore Facebook. People on Facebook will want to use it for events.
2. We only want to update gig details once.
3. A gig needs to be shareable on at least Facebook, Twitter and email.
4. We want people to be able to say they’re coming and ideally comment, but not necessarily all on the same platform.
5. Each gig needs a single canonical URL which acts as the digital address of the physical event.
6. We want to avoid automated or annoying tweets and status updates.

I think the trick is to separate out the functionality:

• Create one master page for each gig with all the details, links, pictures, flyers etc.
• Automate the creation of an entry on each platform you want to support that provides basic information and links back to the master page. This doesn’t include Twitter, unless there’s a very clever non-annoying natural language solution. Better to automate the creation of the Schmap and update Twitter by hand.
• As a bonus, it would be great if the master page could pull in some stats from the satellite pages (eg. how many Facebook RSVPs or Twtvite sign-ups) and reflect the conversation going on around the gig (which might tie in with Steve Lawson’s post about machine tagging gigs) UPDATE: Steve’s post was about machine tagging beta releases of music, but is still worth a read.

What do you reckon?

The question is, what do we use to create the master page? Facebook might be a contender. It’s tricky to feed stuff out from Facebook, but ArtistData could push the content to Facebook and the others.

What do you reckon? Any thoughts? What do you use?

UPDATE: @garrettc, @quitexander, @platform3, @Jazza_UK and @mondoagogo mentioned Last.fm, GigPress, Songkick and friends as good platforms for and/or sources of gig info. Thank you all. I’ll investigate and report back. ;)

I’m going back to an old topic from a new perspective: the ultimate band website. Having thought about it for a year I have a load of random ideas, but I haven’t yet put them together into a coherent structure. This is an attempt to find out what I think about band websites – an essay in the true sense.

What’s the point of a band website?

Most bands want a website that looks cool, in the same way that they want their album art to be cool and their gig posters to be cool. Album art and gig posters have a very simple purpose: the one-way communication of a small amount of information. A website has a complex purpose: it has to be a social object¹ around which people can gather and converse, a point of engagement between fan and band, and a shop (if not more). And it has to look cool.

As with all this internet stuff, there’s no single answer that will suit every band. I rarely find band websites that I think are good, but when I do it’s always because the site completely fits with the band. Pomplamoose’s main internet presence is their YouTube channel, because they make Videosongs and that’s where their fans go to engage with them. BareNakedLadies have a full-featured website with multi-author blogs, behind-the-scenes videos, and shedloads of content², because their fans are geeks and enjoy getting involved with all that stuff.

What about bands that aren’t geeks?

There’s a problem when a band doesn’t use the internet in the same way as its fans. If a band only wants to use MySpace I’m never going to notice them. If a potential fan isn’t on Twitter they are unlikely to hear about me. If a band wants to communicate by post (I’m looking at you, Islet ;) they are going to have trouble engaging with the digital geeks who want to be involved.

There’s a part of me (the wannabe rock star) that sides with the stubborn bands. I stopped playing live gigs completely last year and just played online in various weird and wonderful ways. I love the two issues of The Isness that Islet have posted to me (in the actual post – on paper). I understand that as a band you want to define the rules of engagement and make your artistic statement. I understand that a lot of bands don’t spend all their time online. I understand that maintaining an element of mystery and theatre can make for an amazing magical live show.

But there’s another part of me (the music fan) that’s only ever had really deep positive experiences with bands when I’ve been able to get past the show and find out about the people and the story behind the music. At first it was from my Dad telling stories about records in his collection. As a teenager it was through books and films about rock stars and music scenes that I’d missed by decades, and endless conversations in record shops and issues of Record Collector. Then people started posting MP3 bootlegs on forums³ and making websites about otherwise mysterious legends. Now people recommend music on Posterous, tweet Spotify playlists and the conversations about music are easier to tap into than ever before.

Why not let the fans make all the content?

The old music industry model created social objects (records, magazine interviews, press releases, tabloid stories) to feed the conversation, so the artists didn’t have to. Now people want to engage with bands outside the mainstream press, and either the band creates the social objects or the fans do. A lot of bands are building websites that allow fans to create stuff, but it’s not that easy.

Jonathan Coulton fans make loads of videos, cover versions and remixes of his music, but he gave them loads of stuff first: he posted a song a week and blogged the whole thing. He also spent half his time answering email.

So why not let the fans make all the content? Because in almost all cases they won’t. Not unless the bands make way more first.

Why do fans go to band websites?

This may be the wrong question to ask, because I’m not sure they do. I certainly don’t (well, almost never), and in my straw poll of random people in pubs over the last few months nobody else did either. Let’s figure out the reasons why I very occasionally visit band websites:

• I visit Steve Lawson’s site for the blog. But only occasionally, because I read it in RSS and only ever click through to the site if there’s a funky embed that doesn’t show up in Google Reader.
• I went to Pomplamoose’s site after I’d watched all their YouTube videos to see whether they had anything else to offer. They don’t. Their site is just music players, the latest video, iTunes links and an about page.
• I follow links from Twitter to blog posts on bands’ or artists’ websites sometimes. If it’s an amazing blog post and I’m absolutely overwhelmed with respect for the author I might listen to a track or two.
• That’s it. I may not be a representative music fan, but I’ll bet that if you asked random music-liking people⁴ which band websites they visit regularly (or ever) you’d be met with blank stares. So…

Where do fans go to engage with music online?

Me first. Here’s what I’ve used recently to discover, share, research, listen to and talk about music (not counting my own music):

• @solobasssteve just recommended a band to me on Twitter, after I mentioned liking Pomplamoose.
• Earlier today I checked out Chris TT’s tour schedule after seeing him talk about his upcoming gigs on Twitter. He doesn’t pimp his gigs often – I follow him because I enjoy reading his tweets – so when he does I’m interested.
• Also today I saw Richard Walters tweet about Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue, and sent him a link to the fan website where I originally read about it years ago (before it was reissued⁵).
• A few days ago I listened to some tunes by The Monroe Transfer on their Bandcamp page, after I had a conversation over Google Chat with Nick about releasing music online.
• I’ve watched a load of songs on YouTube that people have recommended, embedded, tweeted, Facebooked or emailed recently – maybe 30 this year.
• I’ve listened to Miriam Jones’ Solitary Songs on Bandcamp because I keep meaning to buy them but haven’t got round to it yet.
• I’ve embedded an occasional YouTube video of a song on my Tumblr blog.
• I’ve listened to maybe a dozen tracks that people I follow have posted on Tumblr, but only when there’s a story or at least a hearty recommendation to go with it. There’s nothing less appealing than a lonely Flash audio player.
• As I was editing this post I listened to three tracks by a band called Physical Education because they flattered me on Twitter.

I don’t really know what other people get up to, but off the top of my head:

• People still seem to be using Spotify quite a lot. This year I’ve only opened it to get a couple of invites to send to people, but then I don’t listen to music radio either so let’s not read too much into that.
• I see quite a few links fly by on Twitter to blip.fm, last.fm and the like.
• Andrew Dubber is making Dubber’s Weekly Jazz (“Like a weekly specialist radio show – but on Spotify”), a weekly Spotify playlist posted to a Posterous blog.
• Steve Lawson is embedding Bandcamp players on a Posterous blog to recommend new music (he even recommended my album!)

Any conclusions?

I’ll let this lot compost for a while and see if I can come up with anything useful, but here are my initial thoughts:

1. I’m an edge case in the big picture of listening habits. But now that the homogenous glob of “audience” is fragmented into a whole load of individuals, I guess we’re dealing with an entire dataset of edge cases. I know that can’t exist (except maybe on a circular graph – anyone?), but you know what I mean.
2. Maybe a band website just needs to link to all the other stuff (sort of like flavors.me, which I used to set up benwalkersongwriter.com yesterday).
3. Maybe a band website needs to be a blog to be interesting. That’s certainly what draws me in to a band (and what I’m leaning towards with my own site).
4. Maybe a band doesn’t need a website at all.
5. Bands need to create shareable stuff. For me as a music fan that means blog posts, YouTube videos, music on Bandcamp or Spotify and MP3s for Tumblr.
6. Mysterious bands never appear on my radar. They may be getting great reviews or appearing in Sunday supplements or being on TV or making the best album ever, but I won’t know about it. And if I don’t know about it I won’t miss it.

I need to have at least half a dozen more pub conversations about this before it will start to make sense. If you can help clarify any of it, or just add an example to my painfully narrow data, please comment. I’m intrigued to know what you think. ;)

There was an awful fuss last week about a company that analyzed Twitter and decided that 40% of it was ‘babble’. As it turns out, their client Philtro is a piece of software that filters Twitter, and their methods of analysis were laughable. To make matters worse they behaved like idiots in the aftermath, with wonderful comments like “If nothing else comes of our research, at least I know that Twitter is really full of self important people who have way too mcuh [sic] time on their hands.”

The fiasco prompted some interesting, thoughtful and occasionally inspirational blog posts from Twitter sympathisers, the best of which was a post by @glinner called The Conversation. It is in fact a direct response to yet another badly-researched Twitter piece in the broadsheets, but it presents a good answer to the ‘babble’ accusation:

…we are communicating with each other on a platform that encourages good manners, that rewards us when we’re interesting and lightly smacks our hand when we’re not. For the first time in history, the human race is having a global conversation, and despite all our differences, we actually seem to be getting on quite well.

Twitter is all about context, and that’s what you can’t see from the outside. Let’s take the classic ‘what I had for breakfast’ tweet:

Avocado on toast. Breakfast of champions. @aliteralgirl

This tweet is not:

• newsworthy;
• literary genius;
• life-changing;
• hilarious;
• sponsored by the Avocado Board with support from the Olympic Committee;
• inciting hatred;
• illegal.

Neither is it:

• boring;
• pointless;
• narcissistic;
• laughable;
• ridiculous;
• a sign that society is doomed.

But it is:

• cute;
• positive;
• polite;
• pithy.

I know @aliteralgirl.

If I didn’t know @aliteralgirl, and I were browsing the Twitter public timeline trying to classify tweets for some shonky PR research assignment, and one of the categories available was ‘Babble’, I would probably class this tweet as ‘Babble’.

But I happen to know @aliteralgirl. And she knows me. We talk in real life once or twice a week, and the rest of the time we’re part of The Conversation on Twitter. So when I saw this tweet I read it as shorthand for something like this:

I’m eating avocado. It’s after 11, so I probably overslept and might be late for my teaching job. I’ll probably have to cycle like a demon to get there, but once I’m there nobody will really care that I was late and I’ll sit staring out of the window as usual. So for now I’m quite amused that I’ve made myself a slightly quirky breakfast, and I’m glad to be able to share it with a handful of people who might be reading Twitter at the moment.

Rather than just reporting my breakfast, which is acceptable but mediocre I’m adding a comment. Staking a claim. Not only am I eating avocado on toast, I’m telling you, the world, that it’s a great thing. Breakfast of champions. If you want to be a champion, you should really be eating this. If I were publishing this in a newspaper, or standing on a street corner shouting it, I would probably choose different words. Something more straightforward, maybe. ‘I love avocado on toast’ or ‘Eat avocado on toast’. But given that my boyfriend (who will definitely read this) and most of the other people who regularly spot my tweets generally have a certain quirky, British sense of humour, I’ve written it as a deadpan advertising slogan knowing full well that everyone will understand the spirit in which it was written. Except maybe the girl who’s watching the public timeline and classifying tweets. She’ll probably put it in the ‘Babble’ box.

You see, this tiny bit of babble is part of a huge conversation. My interpretation is only one of many, and the conversation carries over seamlessly into real life. You might even say that, in this case, the online part of the conversation is an extension of the real life part.

A justimanifestification for the Tweet Suite

I get a bit antsy and embarrassed when artists start to justify and explain their work, or produce manifestos, or make claims about the effects their work has on the world. But sometimes art does have a relevance beyond the aesthetic. Feel free to slap me round the face with a trout if I’m disappearing up my own arse, but I think the Tweet Suite has a message, albeit a simple one:

Babble is valuable in context.

In the context of a conversation, babble has value. With the Tweet Suite I’m setting babble to music, and that gives it context and therefore value. By making the avocado on toast tweet into an annoyingly catchy jingle, I’ve given it an unexpected life beyond its fleeting appearance on a handful of screens.

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Don’t get me wrong. I’m writing the Tweet Suite (50 movements in 90 days) because it’s fun, it’s something interesting to talk about, and I work better to a deadline. But whenever Twitter gets accused of being babble, I’m going to jump on a chair and give an impromptu performance of Movement 7 of the Tweet Suite. So if you see a 9-foot fop singing about avocado on toast, you’ll know what’s going on. And I’d appreciate it if you could join in with the harmonies at the end.

I was at the Royal Court to see a rehearsed reading of a play by Mike Bartlett called Thrown. My good friend and legendary sawist Nick Gill had composed the music, and put together a band of violin, ‘cello, double bass, musical saw and music box for the performance. Thrown was excellent, funny and disturbing, but I want to tell you about the ‘support play’ and how it demonstrated theatre’s reluctance to embrace the open nature of the internet.

Article 19

The Royal Court Theatre (of which, until recently, I was completely unaware) commissions work from talented and underappreciated playwrights, and is therefore brilliant. This particular play was called Article 19, and was written by Juan Mayorga (one of Spain’s most celebrated writers, of whom I was also completely unaware). From the programme:

We asked four leading contemporary playwrights to write a 10 minute play in response to Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Mayorga’s play is a single 15-minute scene in which a mapmaker is being interrogated by a pair of authority figures. He has been making maps of Madrid on commission, each one illustrating a dataset of the patron’s choosing. Some are seemingly innocent, with titles like “the places I’ve kissed my girlfriend” and some are suspicious, most notably the map that shows where all the judges live.

Online mapping is nothing without human interpretation

My mind was racing trying to think of the real-life equivalents of the mapmakers fantastic creations: the mashup that mapped all the BNP members’ addresses, The Guardian’s Open Platform that lets people map the news, Dopplr and the rest. People now have the power to create and publish visualisations of almost anything, and visual representations can communicate a dry dataset to us in a more understandable, even emotional way.

But there was something more about this mapmaker that was making his interrogators scared, and I felt it too. I didn’t imagine his hand-drawn maps as glorified Google Maps with little info bubbles. The way they were described, these maps could simply and quickly communicate everything you need to know about the data. He was interpreting the data and picking out high-level patterns. And it’s the human interpretation that makes them so valuable and dangerous.

I’ve come across some great examples of personal data visualization and mapping recently, and since Mayorga’s play I’ve been bookmarking them:

• Nicholas Felton created The Feltron Annual Report 2008, which shows exactly how far he travelled and how, and anything else he can attach a number to (sporting activities, temperature, birthday parties). It’s amazing how much I feel like I know Felton having read this 8-page report.
• Strange Maps is a blog that collects strange maps. Obviously. It’s incredible. The first one at the moment is What’s On Earth Tonight, a hand-drawn map of the galaxy that shows what alien life at different distances would see on TV signals from Earth (given the speed at which radio waves travel). It’s strange to think that the little green dudes on Mu Arae are intercepting episodes of Rawhide.
• This visualization of the total volume of water on Earth and of air in the Earth’s atmosphere shown as spheres (from the Science Photo Library) made me fall off my chair and realize the fragility of life. The numbers alone would never have had that effect.

Why I’m not allowed to talk about Article 19

I only have one complaint about this play. Why can’t I access it online? Am I crazy to think that publishing the script online would encourage more people to engage with it? I don’t mind if it’s only the Spanish version (assuming it was written originally in Spanish). I would love to be able to read the play again, and explore some of Mayorga’s other work. I would also have liked to use a couple of quotes, and included full attribution with a link so you could read it too. I tried to take a photo of the set before the actors arrived to give you an idea of how it looked. A member of the theatre staff blocked my view and told me photos weren’t allowed.

The Royal Court commissioned a play about the ‘freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers’. The play was a wonderful interpretation of this idea that not only entertained but also provoked discussion, thought and argument in the theatre bar. But frontiers were regarded, and media filtered. Presumably if I had a badge of some sort I would be allowed, even encouraged, to write a review of the play and publish it in a newspaper or magazine. But as a member of the audience note- and picture-taking was frowned upon, and I have no access to the script.

I love what the Royal Court is doing to support and encourage new writing. I think they could do so much more by supporting and encouraging online conversation about their work. Sometimes the artists are already engaged in this way (like Nick blogging about the writing process for Thrown) and just need to be amplified. For those that aren’t (and I realize that there is a generation of playwrights who are loath to use a computer, never mind a blog), there’s a lot the theatre could do on their behalf.

For the conversation to happen, the audience needs a social object around which to gather. For the short time they are in the theatre the performance fulfils that role. But you can’t hyperlink to a performance, so there needs to be something online: a recording of the performance, a script, photos, even a blog post. And better still, why not let the audience create some of that. Let me take a picture. I’ll be happy to tag it #royalcourt, release it under a Creative Commons license and let the theatre use it as part of the online performance.

There’s a lively discussion happening in the comments to Steve Lawson’s article After CDs. What’s Next?. Steve reckons we should be excited about the artistic freedom we’re afforded by abandoning the format of The Album:

It’s amazing how containers can make us lazy about content. The assumptions we make about the nature of music, collections of music, what constitutes a ‘complete work’ etc.

I absolutely agree, and I’ve come across a wonderful example of a post-Album project that not only breaks the boundaries by being 185 songs long, but is delivered as a podcast, features 185 different artists and provides better sleeve notes than I ever saw on a CD.

I’m not going to miss the album that much.

Seriously. I never thought the day would come when I would be happy to leave my record collection (and my 1983 direct drive turntable) languishing in a barn. But that’s where they are. If I feel sentimental about my dog-eared 12″ of Deep Purple’s Burn (like I did last week), I grab the torrent and ten minutes later it’s on my iPod as I stroll down the street grinning and brandishing the air guitar.

Musicians get quite precious about The Album as an artistic form, and there are loads of albums that are so much more than a simple playlist of songs. Sleeve notes and artwork also help to create a listening experience around the music. That’s great, and there’s nothing to stop musicians creating 45-minute collections of songs for download if that’s what they want to do. They can even separate them into Side A and Side B if they like. Two ZIP files instead of one. And sleeve notes work really well online – check out David Jennings’ wonderful 69 Love Songs companion piece.

When you think about it, the album was good for a few things:

• It gave musicians a form within which to create music.
• It gave the audience an easy and understandable way of supporting an artist.
• It gave the record company a product.
• It was a carrier for sleeve notes and artwork (aka. context).

Now the record industry is concerning itself with collapse, profits and Britain’s Got Talent. The audience has a new easy, understandable way of supporting an artist (iTunes etc.). The musicians are starting to realise that it’s not very difficult to replace the creative limitations of the album format with limitations of their own devising. Being creative is, after all, what they are supposed to be good at.

So now we can create whatever musical projects we like to catch people’s attention, it’s the really creative artists who are making waves. Roger and Dave are a pair of musicians, artists and producers who work in New York. They have come up with the best idea I have heard in, well, ever.

The Beatles Complete On Ukulele

It sounds like the kind of project I would find scrawled in my Moleskine the morning after a party. On finding this message from my enlightened self, I would chuckle and cross it neatly out. Because I’m not as brilliant and visionary as Roger and Dave.

The concept is simple (and it’s all about the concept):

Roger and Dave will….

1. Record & perform on ukulele all 185 original compositions by The Beatles with 185 guest artists.
2. Write essays to coincide with each release.
3. Make available for download one new recording and essay every Tuesday for 185 weeks, beginning January 20, 2009 (Inauguration Day) and climaxing July 24, 2012 (The eve of the London Olympics).

Each song is posted on a simple Blogger website, and there’s an RSS feed so you can subscribe to the project as a podcast in iTunes. And that’s where it becomes really interesting, and where Roger and Dave have created something new and beautiful.

It’s all about the experience

When you listen to the latest Beatles cover on your iPod, the accompanying essay (aka. sleeve notes) is displayed on your iPod screen. So you read it as you’re listening. They give you an amusing but incredibly well researched insight into the writing and recording of the original, including anecdotes and rambles about what John and Paul were up to at that point in their songwriting career. They critique the song and the recording as songwriters, producers, curators and archivists. Then they introduce you to whoever is covering the song (a different musician sings each week, and they provide the ukulele and produce the rest of the track).

By the time you’re half way through reading the sleeve notes the song has finished, so you put it on again to get the rest of the essay. And maybe again. You listen to the song two or three times through while reading about it and immersing yourself in the details and the stories. Does this sound familiar? Isn’t this the mythical value of The Album? Didn’t you used to sit on your bed listening to the album all the way through two or three times while scouring the sleeve notes and the artwork for context, reassurance and trivia?

That’s how I felt when I sat on the train listening to Emily Zuzik singing Hold Me Tight (one of the most exhiliratingly cool tracks I’ve heard for years) and reading the essay. Try it. Right now. Press play and read the quote:

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The tune features an incredibly precocious vocal melody over a swinging American Rhythm and Blues form. Fabulous harmony. But critically, Hold Me Tight is marred by insipid innocuous non-threatening male expressions of affection, designed to elicit the slightest of squeals from a twittering Tween. Lyrically typical of the songs Lennon and McCartney were writing at the time, our Hero is not even getting to first base. Hold Me Tight. I Wanna Hold Your Hand. I’m Happy Just To Dance With You. Young girls like to be liked. But not too much. Don’t go too far. Musically this song is a success. Lyrically, embarrassing. What’s going on here? The contrast between the Beatles STD-riddled, licentious and voluptuous pill popping real lives, and the lyrics of their early teenage puppy love songs, was vast. I believe this cognitive dissonance was a central facet of their initial appeal.

I don’t know about you, but that’s what I’m looking for in a listening experience. An experience. I want my music to arrive with this much context built in. We’ve been doing it with video, with live shows and with websites of vaguely interesting writing. And now Roger and Dave are doing it with a podcast. And a ukulele.

It Won’t Be Long

When you come across a project like this, you would be insane not to get involved. So when Roger and Dave asked me to record a song for TBCOU, I dug out my old Beatles records and searched for a song to cover. I didn’t have to look far. It Won’t Be Long is the first track on With The Beatles, which is the first Beatles album I ever heard while digging through my dad’s collection back in the late eighties. The song is fun, cheesy, and energetic. Ideal.

I recorded a quirky but authentic version with a simple guitar track, the main riff on piano and sixteen tracks of harmonies, and emailed it to New York. Having heard the spotless production and impeccable wit of the first 21 tracks of the project, I have a feeling this is going to be incredible.

If you want my musical recommendation for 2009 (and a podcast that will keep delivering amazing versions of songs you already love until 2012!) I suggest you subscribe to TBCOU right now. And in case you need any more persuasion, here’s the latest episode. A dub reggae version of Blackbird. Un. Fucking. Believeable. ;)

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UPDATE: My cover of It Won’t Be Long is up on the TBCOU site, and it’s better than I could have imagined!