“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.
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.
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.
I’ve heard the song a million times, but hearing guitarist Joe Gore talk about it just gives it so much depth. Like, I can’t even imagine standing in the same room with Tom Waits, let alone making music with the man, and hearing Joe talk like that – even with all his knowledge and skill – it’s just so heavy.
Love the concept of turning the artists into amateurs… using “inferior” equipment, no time to really come up with parts, everything in two takes, and Tom needs to be done by 5 so he can be home with his kids. Man. This is a great interview.
“(T)he first one I can really remember is Punk Rock Strike Vol. 1 by Springman Records. My gosh, as a young punk trying to discover new bands, that thing was a game changer. It was my first exposure to bands like The Wunder Years, No Use for a Name, and The Amazing Transparent Man, just to name a few.”
Spoke with another friend today who mentioned the Lumberjack Distro samplers we all used to get, which reminded me specifically of the ‘Lumberjack Distribution Spring 2003 Sampler.’
I had two MP3s saved from those days, the first of which was Kid Gorgeous‘ ‘Anyone Ever Tell You That You Talk Too Much.’
Most of it was standard metalcore fare, but the ending chorus section, those guitar harmonics or whatever? I LOVED that.
The other was ‘Missives On a Recurring Theme’ by Theory Of Ruin which I can’t find streaming anywhere, but here’s a link. Like, can’t even find it on YouTube. If I didn’t rip this song back in the mid 2000s, would it even exist anywhere online?
These are from over 20 years ago, from the year 2003. This was just two years after I started my music blog, and I was like a kid in a candy store, just devouring this type of stuff.
All these years later, yeah, it’s harder to get excited about finding new music, just because, dammit… I’ve listened to such much music over the last 30 years, you know?
When I was a kid in the late 80s, we had hair metal and Guns N Roses ‘Appetite for Destruction’ and Metallica’s ‘… And Justice For All.’
Then I was in high school in the 90s, so that means Rage Against the Machine, Nirvana and SoundGarden and Alice in Chains and Primus, like… my god.
Then yeah.. early 2000s up till like 2010 I was drowning in music, having run my own music blog, then started NoiseCreep for AOL Music in 2008.
That’s a long time to have been focusing on music with such intent. All the shows I went to, bands I interviewed, albums I listened to.
Right now, at 48, it’s just so much harder to get excited about new music. I absolutely love some of it (Knocked Loose comes to mind, of course), but… dammit, I’m not in my 20s or 30s anymore.
CJ Chilvers knows his music, so when he streamed Extreme’s Cupid’s Dead he got a surprise:
“I noticed something new in the song “Cupid’s Dead.” Trumpets! I had 30 years of experience with that song. There had never been horns in it. But here they were, being annoying as hell and obscuring Nuno’s incredible riffs.”
