Rock and Roll McDonald's

Revisiting old friends (and blogs)

One thing I find interesting is revisiting old songs and playing them either in a different way, or with a different instrument, or both. It's a test of the strength of a song if you can bend and stretch and pull and it holds up, even in a completely different form.

Especially when you go from a full-band configuration to a solo voice + single instrument configuration, the challenge becomes trying to find the right bits of the music in the song to imply, without it sounding like someone came in and somehow muted the instrumental track. It certainly puts more challenge into plowing through material that is years old -- I think it's a really great exercise and often I'll do it as a kind of warm-up/drill; take a guitar-driven song and play it on the piano, or vice versa, and see if you can make it work. The difficulty is avoiding the same tricks you inevitably get in the habit of defaulting to.

This Saturday Sean and I will be doing just that as we play a bunch of HD songs as just piano and solo voice, at the Largo small room in Los Angeles. We did a few shows like this last year on the East Coast (as well as one opening for They Might Be Giants last fall) and while it's a lot more nerve-wracking since I don't have the rest of the band to fall back on, the challenge makes it much more interesting. 

In other news, I'm going through the filtering/review process of assorted bits/pieces/ideas for the next batch of music. I hesitate to say "album" since it's not clear if there really are going to be albums anymore by the time we finish. But yes, new material.

(Oh yeah, it's been what, two and a half years since I last posted something? Sorry for the long, uh, hiatus. I'll try to post more regularly from now on.)

A couple decades too late for Pete Townshend

I was at Costco a few days ago and noticed you can now buy a real honest-to-God grand piano there now. It's true. New Kawais. You'll find them about five feet from the gourmet cheese fridge, part of the bulk meats section.

And I just noticed that Costco.com offers the Gibson ES-335 along with other Gibson guitars ('61 SG reissue anyone?). I wonder if you can only buy them in the "family size" 10-pack or "assorted varities" set?

At the end of the day, what's left?

This I read the other day with great interest. Basically it's about Cordless, a new record label that's being run by Jac Holzman, who started Elektra records back in the day. It's part of Warner Music group, as I understand.

There's a couple interesting things about Cordless. The first is that they allow the artists to keep their masters, which is pretty unusual. The second, and more curious aspect, is that there are no physical products -- it's intended to be a digital-only. So no CDs, no physical distribution network. The third is that they aren't going to be releasing full-length "albums" (basically collection of 10+ songs); instead they will be releasing three songs at a time, more frequently. Fourth, the traditional big record-label advance is nowhere to be seen -- the advance is able to recover some of the recording costs, but not much more. There is no tour support, since the idea of the label is to promote the artists solely online.

Which leads us to the question: Well then, what exactly does the label add?

Webhosting and distribution are pretty easy and cheap to get (and getting cheaper all the time). Capitalization? For most bands, any money to help with recording -- especially if you're just getting started -- is welcome. But besides that? Not very much, maybe a little marketing knowledge, but at this scale it's unlikely that they'd be spending tons of money promoting any band. Being with an established name is definitely a big advantage nowadays, since with so may acts clamoring for attention, any differentiator will help. And certainly just having a third party that helps move things along and does some of the work (as I can attest) can ensure things get done on the days when you'd rather just slack off.

However, all that aside, there is one substantive thing that a label can (and a long time ago, far away, used to) provide -- and that is guidance and coaching. Perspective, wisdom, and insight into an artist's latent talents, and the ability to help draw these out -- this is an extremely rare and valuable skill which only a few people can do. A&R guys were supposed to do this, but all I've ever seen in A&R roles are a bunch of glorified scouts who only know how to say "I don't hear the songs" and play the construct-a-band-from-other-bands game.