HELLO, I'M SETH WERKHEISER

NOAH KALINA SLOWLY LOSING HIS MIND

This image from Noah’s recent video shook me. What a shot.

KEEP IT GOING

This is from Cassidy Frost’s latest, How to Dedicate Your Life to Music When You’re Fucking Scared:

“You don’t need to believe in yourself, you just need to act in service of whatever thing you do believe in, no matter how small.”

Stack up Small Acts daily and weekly. They don’t need to be heavy, cost a lot of money, or take up a lot of time.

As time passes, these Small Acts will create a mountain built on all the cool things you’re doing.

Then I saw this is Lauren’s latest newsletter a day later:

“If you keep swimming, shooting your shot, putting in the reps, things are bound to look different or at least pleasantly more weird a year later.”

Heck yes, “pleasantly more weird.”

The work doesn’t guarantee you’ll achieve some new level of success. But the cliche “it’s the journey, not the destination” rings true for a reason.

Act in service of yourself. It has to start there. Yes, help may come, but you must work towards something for someone to believe that helping out is worth the effort.

LIFE IS TENSION

To be alive is fraught with tension – a delicate balance of having your shit together and being moments away from everything falling over the rails.

People talk about the “hot new thing” because of tension. Taylor Swift has a big tour. Great! I’d love to go. Tickets are $1000, and the nearest tour stop is five hours away. That’s tension.

There’s no tension in posting a song on Spotify or uploading a video to YouTube. That’s the easy part. Telling someone, “I posted a new single on Spotify,” is easy. An AI bot could write that. No tension.

Time to up the ante. Send the link to only ten people, and then see what happens. Show your next film or gallery with only a cryptic map to a secret underground venue under the local college water tower. Limit the number of people that can attend your next Zoom meeting.

When everything is available for everyone, there’s little incentive to pay attention; it’ll be here tomorrow, digitally or available to purchase on Amazon.

FRIENDS SHARE

Great bit from Looking Sideways:

Let’s face it, being an independent creative person amid this onslaught of algorithms and homogenous content is bloody hard and endlessly soul-destroying. Sharing your friends’ work is good for the soul, hugely encouraging for them, and a vote for the type of creative world we actually want to live in.

HOLIDAY SELLING

Photo by Seth Werkheiser

Recently I did a Klaviyo “check-up” for a record label and found they had two abandoned cart flows going at the same time (which meant every user got TWO emails to remind them of items in their cart – ooops).

I’ve been using Klaviyo since 2020 for music labels (including Death Row Records).

The holidays are coming up – if you need a second set of eyes on your email marketing setup (Klaviyo mainly, but I work in Mailchimp a bit, too), let’s connect: hey@sethw.xyz

WORK TOGETHER

I love that Mastodon and Lamb of God – two of biggest names in modern metal – teamed up and released a song after touring together.

“We [in Mastodon] were just talking about the possibility of doing more collaborations because we don’t do it enough and it’s a fun thing to do,” said drummer Brann Dailor in an interview with Rolling Stone.

These two bands didn’t need to do something like that this at all – they’re already legends, selling out venues and plenty of vinyl over the years.

Even if you’re not in a band, DO COOL STUFF WITH OTHER PEOPLE, FRIENDS.

When asked why they didn’t release the song before they left for tour:

“The music industry is a complex and at times clunky behemoth. It’s not like we wanted to just put it out on YouTube, like, “Check out our song,” with a picture of me and Brann, like, “Er.”

YES. Don’t just put it up on YouTube and make an IG story saying, “CHECK IT OUT.” It don’t work for Mastodon, it won’t work for you.

BYE, DAD

Last week was a lot.

I found out my dad died on July 30th, 2024.

We don’t know the exact time he passed, but he died alone in a trailer park in Florida. We didn’t have much of a relationship in the last seven or so years of his life for reasons I won’t go into, but I want to share a bit about his music.

My dad was an absolute music theory genius. He spoke in keys and modes and time signatures. He could play multiple instruments, listen to a song once, and play it for you backward and forward.

When I was a kid, he played in a country rock band called The Buckaroos, playing at ski resorts on the weekends and clubs during the week. He made good money playing guitar in the eighties.

Live music started to fade in our area, so he started teaching music out of his house. One of his students was a fiddle player who moved to Nashville and toured with a notable country artist or two.

In his later years, he’d seek out bass players and drummers, always looking to form a jazz trio. He had some luck getting gigs back in PA and later in Florida.

But when these groups fell apart, so did he.

He would still play at home, with his little Polytone amp that he bought in the 80s, playing his be-bop jazz and whatever else came out from his decades of experience.

This is from my recent post “Outdated expectations kill creative dreams,” over on Substack.

That photo at the top of this post was from dad’s old digital camera. It’s so old it takes 2AA batteries.