Category: Blog

As I’ve gone through this process the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to assess what the right pace should be for posting songs.   So far, I have to say that posting a song a week has felt a little frenetic.   It feels too fast.   I’m also concerned that if/when my schedule returns to normal, I’ll have a hard time meeting my own deadlines.

I’m going to take a stab at a different pacing.   Let’s try posting a new song every 2 weeks, on the 15^th and the 30^th of each month.

I might change my mind about that after we do some things to attract more people to the site (we’re really still in build mode here), but that’s probably a little ways off.

As usual, let me know what you think…

I’ve intentionally tried to have the look and feel of this website be different from standard music sites you find. When you go to a musician’s site, you usually see one of two things:

* Singer/Songwriters will leverage heavily on some scenery picture. They’re sitting on a beach…at sunset…with a seagull flying overhead…in a leather jacket no one would ever wear to a beach. The writer is SERIOUS. They’ve been CONTEMPLATING.

* Bands will almost always have sites that are totally black and white, with lots of bold print. You’ll find dramatic, black and white pictures of the band in mid-movement while performing. There will be lots of areas to look if you have ADD. They have ENERGY. It’s frenetic, because things are HAPPENING with the band.

I wanted something totally different from either prototype.

If you go to a site where someone sells art, you see something different. You see color. You see clean, white space. You see that the artist thought about how to make the site look different.

When I was sketching this out, that was my goal. I wanted a clean site. I wanted COLOR. I wanted the focus on the songs. I wanted someone to hit the site and say “hmmm…this is already pretty different…let me check this out.”

I may have overshot it a bit, and I may have developed something a little too niche and not bound for mass appeal. We’ll see. I’ll definitely play with the look and feel as we go…

My vision for this site is for it to be something different from the normal industry path.   I want this site to focus on individual songs.  For years, I’ve had long debates with friends about what to do with my work. The most common advice I get is that I should do the following:

* Pick 15 songs
* Record a CD with professional musicians
* Put together a band
* Perform the songs in clubs
* Sell that CD on various websites (and also while touring)
* Rinse and repeat until something hits

Make MONEY!!

Piece of cake.

In short…that’s just not my vision.  Not only does that upset my existing life, but nothing in the above list is conducive to continuing to write good songs.   And what I’ve cared about is whether or not I’m producing songs that can resonate.

If someone ELSE wants to take some of these songs and follow the above path, all good.   I’d love to see that happen.

For me, though, I’m determined to find another way, even if it means I fail at this.   Frankly, even the underlying technology itself for an everyday, individual website isn’t flexible enough to do what I want to do.  That’s actually battle #1 in the next few months.

I want this website to be different.  I want this site to be about each song.  One by one.  Updated every week.  Constantly changing.  Constantly engaging.  An ongoing discussion.  A place someone can come to every week for something unique.  It’s a different model, but let’s see how that goes…

It’s been quite a process to get this site up and running.  Up until now, the process I’ve followed to “save” a song has been:  write it, edit it, and then save it on some unbelievably outdated technology or lo-fi device in my house (cassette tape, iPhone, etc).   I generally tended to record all the songs written in a year in the last week of that year, save it all as one batch, put it on a shelf, write the names of the songs down on my master list of songs in Excel, save all the lyrics to that year’s songs on a single file (S13.doc, S14.doc, etc), and then move on.   Job done.

Every so often along the way, it was pointed out to me that I was missing a step…

Over the last year, I’ve gone through a process to unearth what got stored away.   I even listened to stuff going back to high school and early college (which was, um…MORTIFYING).   I found lots of songs that I’d completely forgotten about, a number of songs that I was able to “fix,” and way more songs that didn’t work than I would ever want to admit.  Like…way more.  I didn’t know what I was doing for a long time.

Writing songs that work is actually quite hard.

The end result, though, was that I came to a collection that I felt was worth sharing and “officially” recording, using real recording tools (ProTools, studio help).

And so we’re now to the part of the process I skipped—sharing.   If I drop one song a week, I should be able to update this site with new material (hopefully good material) for a few years, without repeating anything.  I’m looking forward to seeing how they do in the real world.

Please send me any feedback you have at [email protected].