Month: December 2020

Showing Up is the Secret

From one of my recent emails from The Soft Run:

As I approached this house a kid (maybe 10 or 11) came running around a corner today, and yelled, asking to use my phone.

Then as I got closer, I realized he wasn’t wearing socks or shoes!

Just another day, just another run, right? Nope. One run out of almost 300 this year, and never once did I see a jeep set-up like the one above, nor did I help a kid get back into his house after being locked out in the middle of winter with no shoes or socks. BRRR.

I keep getting lost in the binary thinking of success, of making it. Either you’re a popular YouTube star with a million subscribers, or you’ve only got 13 and it feels like a waste of time.

You want to be this “thing,” but you don’t have the “social evidence” that you are the thing.

Are you a musician if no one buys your music? Are you a writer if no one replies to your pitches? Are you a photographer if you’re images aren’t on magazine covers?

Again, permission. Waiting for permission is the killer.

I am 44 years old – what right do I have to wear gaudy purple sneakers and tights and a cool jacket and run around the backroads here?

I work in music – what right do I have to make “dark ambient” mixes? What, do I think I’m going to MAKE IT?!?!

Wait, I thought I made dark ambient mixes – why am I making smooth chill jams with funky stock video footage?

Because I choose to.

Am I now locked into that identity? Must I now maintain a weekly music mix? Set up a live stream? Do a daily tune and post on every social network?

Well, if I choose to, sure.

Just go be everything you want to be. Doesn’t matter if it looks right, sounds right, has the right presentation – just make a little bit of magic each day.

This post partially inspired by Seth Godin’s ‘The Practice: Ship creative work‘ book.

Spending Some Time with Circle

In keeping Metal Bandcamp Gift Club going over the years (and sometimes not going, oops), it’s been a struggle to match the sense of community we had on Twitter back in 2016. As you know, quite a bit of things changed back in 2016.

I’ve resisted going all-in on Twitter again, mostly because a lot of people I know that were once involved don’t even do Twitter much anymore, for some pretty obvious reasons: their inaction against dangerous jerks, their inaction against harassment except when it might happen to men, nazi stuff – the list goes on and on.

I don’t want to tell my friends to come visit me at a dangerous bar filled with sexist creeps, jerks, and nazis, so why would I do so online?

So, Metal Bandcamp Gift Club has mostly been an email newsletter, and it’s been working well. Each day that there’s a birthday, we send out an email to about 120 people and a handful of those people buy music for someone they don’t know from their Bandcamp wishlist. It’s wonderful.

People feel good, they discover music, and artists and musicians and label make money.

But, that’s pretty much where it ends.

Yes, some members thank each other on Twitter, but blink and you’ll miss it. And heck, Twitter might not even let all that many people see that post, either.

Now a post on Circle (like above) is a post for every member to see. And if you blink, you can find it a day or a week later. Many times someone on Twitter will talk about a new album, or some gem they found, but if you’re not on Twitter right then and there, it could be gone forever. Same with year end album talk – there could be a great thread happening in real time on a Thursday night, but if you’re doing something else, and you check back in on Saturday, it’s probably gone.

I don’t know for sure if Circle is the solution, but I know for sure the current state of Twitter (and all of social media) is a big problem, and I’m trying to fix it for our little corner of the internet.

First Big Snowy Day of Fall

Crawling back into bed would have been more cozy. I had some tea, which was nice bit of warmth in the morning, but for some reason I threw on my jacket and shoveled our walk paths. It was nice to stop, take a breather, and enjoy a scene like you see above.

Later in the day I got in my daily run. This was day #25, at least a mile a day since November 23rd. The roads were trashed still, so todays run wasn’t a breeze, but if running has taught me anything it’s that crummy conditions don’t last forever. In a few days this crummy run won’t even register, but getting it done was still a piece of the foundation to where I wanna go in 2021.

We’ll Never Join the Galactic Federation

The delivery, the snark, the attitude – god, I love this so much.

I love that in a second, in just a few thumb-swipes on social media, you can come across a video so well done that you’re saying the lines to yourself while you’re making coffee.

“Logistics? You want me to write… logistics?”

“Oh, you still have prisons!”

Like, growing up with Star Wars, Ghost Busters, Air Plane – there’s just random movie quotes that we all know from our years of watching movies. Then of course Key & Peele (“I said bisssshhhhhh”), or “it is you!” Then Vine, and videos like this; the videos get shorter, but the quotes are just as strong.

Start Your Own Thing and Do It Soon

Randomly discovered this video with bassist Juan Alderete from a recent email blast from Abelton (for this post). Jaun played in The Mars Volta, and started a website at one point called Pedals and Effects, because he hated pedal review websites.

He just… made his own.

He bought a domain name and started doing it like he wanted.

Such a theme in life, right?

Don’t like your job, find a new one.
Don’t like the music you hear, start a band.
Don’t like podcasts that are out there, go make one.

You don’t need permission.

“Do you think people would like this sort of music?
“Should I start this podcast about weird horror movies?”
“If I made more of these, do you think people would buy them?”

Stop asking for permission and make your shit.

Can you walk around like Jaun here everyday and hang out with the dude from Nine Inch Nails? No, but I’m sure 20 years ago neither could Jaun.

And, holy shit, in digging more into this, Jaun was in a serious bicycle accident back in January 2020 and had to learn to fucking walk again.

Time is short, life is fleeting, start your shit now. Today.

Buy that domain name, shoot your first episode, upload your three song demo to Bandcamp today – tomorrow ain’t a promise.

Fell Hard for Beach Riot

Heavy, poppy, catchy – hell yes, I love this. Discovered by random on the Bandcamp front page, on the “Selling Right Now” scroller. Click, click, bang. Fell in love, listened to it twice, and had to buy it.

Digging For Music

@joekay

The last album that came my way via a DSP algorithm was VOWWS‘ ‘Under The World,’ back in 2018. For real, two years since and Apple Music nor Spotify has really surfaced anything for me.

These days I just go to Bandcamp, pick a genre that I’m interested in at the moment, then look for album art that intrigues me. It’s how I found these amazing albums:

If you’ve been listening to music for years, and buy albums, you know shit that looks good most of the time sounds good. It’s how DJs source music from local shops – finding shit that looks cool is a great place to start. And now with Bandcamp, it’s even easier.

Compare with this Spotify playlist, one of the biggest for “Dark Ambient,” with almost 7,000 followers.

It may has well be a fucking Google Sheet. No artwork, no branding, no vibes.

Same with Apple Music. Sure, it’s got the cool Apple playlist branding, and while it has album art, you have to use binoculars to really tell what looks good.

Of course, this is all a ploy to get you to hit play. Just trust them, and don’t worry about that album art, I guess.

All that said, nothing is black and white. I still use Apple Music for streaming a playlist on my runs. I also stream NTS radio via Apple Music, and some DJ sets via the MixCloud app.

There are so many ways to listen and consume music. Bandcamp, though, is the closest we got right now to the local record shop, and the feeling of digging through the used CD bins (my favorite).

Above I just outlined how I dig, and maybe you have better luck than me with the big streaming services. So keep digging, friends. Support artists and musicians when you can and buy their music.

Keeping Things In Focus Even When It Sucks

From today’s ‘Soft Run’ newsletter:

“There’s grit to running fast. Every now and again you’re gonna feel good and just let it rip – great! But you gotta bring it back. You gotta rest. Trot. Shuffle. Walk. 

See, just as you seek to get that fast pace, search for that slow shuffle, too. You want to be in control at all points during your run. How can you be in control when you’re running fast if you can’t do it when shuffling along?”

Stay Focused Where You’re At

If you want to learn how to play guitar, you have to get good at picking it up everyday. Dream someday of writing for an audience of 1000s? Better get good at writing for 10 people today.

I’ve been running for almost 4.5 years, and this is the first where I racked up 1,000 miles. It took a lot of shitty, slow, gross feeling runs. Expecting each run to be a joyous flowery affair isn’t reasonable, just as expecting each guitar lesson to feel amazing doesn’t make sense either.

Finding the grit to keep going when it doesn’t feel good is the hard work, and everybody has to find their own path on that journey.

God Chose You So Let’s Do This

https://twitter.com/AoctaviusW/status/1337432994596982787

I fucking love this:

The first thing I said when I contacted Porche was ”hey I’m the photographer on assignment to photograph you for TIME and I truly understand if you want a Black woman photographing you” She stopped me and said, ”Baby, God chose you so let’s do this” ⁣

@AoctaviusW

Putting this here, linking to it, filing it here because it hit me today, this Tweet. This block of photography and text, flowing through my time line.

In our work, where we’re at, our circles, our circumstances – yeah, I don’t believe it’s an almighty fatherly figure who held me in his hands and dropped me off in Pennsylvania 44 years ago, but…

I’m here. You’re here. Let’s do this.

It’s so easy to forget the art and the magic and the grace and the power we have in each day, every interaction, every email, everything. I look at the circumstances I’m in, we’re all in, and realize while there’s so much further I want to go, I must remain grateful with where I’m at.

Let’s do this.

My to-do list is long, there’s incomplete projects, things unfinished; let’s do this. Maybe not just out of obligation, but perhaps it’s these foundational moments that are seemingly trivial are going to lead to great things.

I had no idea learning how to play bass in 1991 would get me here, today. That a hobby I took up 29 years ago would land me the clients I have, the career that I have, the everything that I have. It’s good, it’s bad, it’s ugly, but it’s where I’m at.

“Baby, God chose you, so let’s do this.”

That Tweet is from Adrian Octavius Walker.