Category: Musicology
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Releasing a record is a lot
Last week was a whirlwind. Album finally dropped on streaming, lawsuit underway, lots of work and personal stuff. B’s birthday month in full swing!Now I’m into the “claiming my profile as a first-time artist” on Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, Deezer? and on and on.I have finally been approved to upload my lyrics to a service…
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Weaving the strands
There’s a lot going on! The website for the record is launched and pretty close to final, at least for a v1. I’m particularly keen on the semi-hidden per-session notes and photos. The long weekend has given my some time to catch up things and some time to scheme about new things. Next week is…
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Summer jam?
The single from my album has hit its first streaming service:
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Deep breaths…
I have received my shipment of prerelease CDs (unboxing vid below). So not only can you order a CD now, but if you do it soon, you can actually get your copy before the official release date in June. For now, I’m just savoring that new CD smell. (Cover art by Dave Gray. Sleeve design…
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Launching soon…
The Kickstarter campaign for the limited edition vinyl LP release of No One Does it Solo Only will be launching soon. You can sign up to notified when the campaign launches for real (within the next two weeks), now on the site.
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Which dreamed it?
A colleague of mine was telling us about Google’s “Notebook LLM” which enables you to upload or point to as specific body of content and then get a summary, chat about the content, or even have the LLM generate a semi-plausible sounding synthetic “podcast” in which two perky morning-show type hosts discuss what you’ve shoveled…
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Merch mocks
Since I decided to run a Kickstarter campaign to try to raise some funds (and gauge the level of interest) for a vinyl release of No One Does It Solo Only, and that means thinking about the rewards at various tiers. I can share more of my thinking on that soon if anyone cares, but…
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Manufacturing
The files are off the the manufacturer and if you just can’t contain yourself, you can preorder a CD now! No One Does It Solo Only by Layers of Meta
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This one time…
No One Does It Solo Only by Layers of Meta is now available for pre-order at Bandcamp: No One Does It Solo Only by Layers of Meta
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Serendip
Made a last minute choice to swing up to Menlo Park after work to a little place called Bar Loretta, tucked inside a restaurant called Left Bank, apparently on the site Magoo’s Pizza Parlor, the site of the first proto-Grateful Dead show sixty years ago. Billed as the Warlocks still, the show featured the first…
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Master and sequencer
Another milestone! I’m listening to digital masters for the album and thinking about the gaps, the little breathers between the end of one song and the start of the next. We should have those fine details sorted by next week, after which the files go off the Crooked Cove (to manufacture the CDs) and CD…
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Wooosh
A good friend of mine talks about that feeling of creative flow in which it gets easier to make your ideas real. It comes and goes on its own but you can certainly invite and you can definitely chase it way. You can at the very least leave the door open and cultivate the habit…
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More punk than you
Reading sadly of David Thomas’s death at 71 of kidney failure it appears, the legendary founder of Pere Ubu. Remembering how my hipper than thou postpunk mentor and now-famous game pundit Jeff Green told me about first seeing him before a show and wondering something like who the fat guy in the used car salesman…
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Celebrate every milestone
I just signed off on the final edits to “Sham Song.” it’s fitting that the one I started writing before I ever wrote a real song would be the last one perfected for my Perfectible Recordings record. I learned long ago to recognize a celebrate every step along the way of a long journey, every…
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Back at the keyboard
Happy Easter to those who celebrate it today! I went to bed late last night and had a momentary diarist’s bout of conscience for not having added anything to the pile here yesterday. And yet I was writing all day. Have been, really, for at least a week now. I’m trying to get a bunch…
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Houston, we have a CD sleeve
Thanks to the amazing artwork of Dave Gray and the tasteful design choices and execution of Rowan Bishop, my group’s forthcoming record No One Does It Solo Only now has a design for the sleeve of the CD! Looks like the song order is on lock now too.
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First impressions
I’m back in the product business. As we get closer to the scheduled June release of No One Does It Solo Only, I have to think about packing, merchandising, distribution, website, and so on. I mean, I like thinking about things like that. I liked it when I was in book publishing, I like it…
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Record store day!
Drove up to Oakland this morning to meet my pals in Rockridge to check out some new vinyl releases for this spring’s record store day at Open Mind Music (and, it turns out, Stranded up the street). After a scare with a lost phone and some very good samaritans we each headed home with our…
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I love it when a plan comes together
I don’t want to jinx anything but it feels like we are on track for a June 11 release date for my album (in digital formats). We’re in the homes stretch now
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New sounds of silence
I’ve recently been following this artist on Soundcloud, Sarah Walker, whose specialty is freely reinterpreting standards of the past (many of them from my own formative years) in what I might say is a more contemporary style, reminiscent of popular singer-songwriters of the moment (think Tay Tay, et al.). The premise seems to be imagine…
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New order (movement)
The listening party was a blast! I don’t think we got any notes on the arrangements (though I have a handful of tweaks in mind for several of the songs), but we had a great discussion about the sequencing, the flow of the songs, the emotional highs and lows, where to start each “side” (even…