laid off.

just got laid off. i'm gonna have to postpone the release of my album until...well, we'll see.

dolly has a blog

and you damn well better check it out, unless you're okay with missing gems like the entry of 2/4/09, which begins "Boy, I really am busier than the one-legged man in a butt kicking contest."

mastering

i'm going to go with West West Side Music for the mastering of my debut LP. last night i had a really terrific conversation with the owner and chief engineer Alan Douches; their rates are incredibly reasonable and they seem to be as artist-friendly as you please.

they've also done a ton of great work; their credits read like an indie band high school yearbook:

Sufjan Stevens, Nile, Brand New, Animal Collective, Fleetwood Mac, Mastodon, Everytime I Die, Clutch, Ben Folds Five, Converge, Galaxy 500, Beirut, Midlake, !!!, Shadows Fall, The Promise Ring, Against Me!, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Sepultura, Dalek, Yes, Fallout Boy, Hole, Thrice, Ted Leo, The Rapture, Superjoint Ritual, Hatebreed, Fat Boy Slim, Run DMC, The Misfits, Hot Water Music, Sick of It All, Black Dice, The Wrens, Les Savy Fav, My Morning Jacket, Cave In, Buzzcocks, LCD Sound System, Atreyu, Rupert Holmes, Panda Bear, From Autumn To Ashes, The Dismemberment Plan, Luke Temple, Snapcase, Martin Denny, Trans-Am, H2O, Hot Rod circuit, The Chemical Brothers, Luna, Monster Magnet, Rye Coalition, The Slackers, Glen Burtnik, Radio 4, Burning Airlines, Kramer, Alakaline Trio, Jets to Brazil, Her Space Holiday, My Brightest Diamond, Girls Against Boys, A Static Lullaby, Maritime, Danielson, Dave LaRue, Def Jux, Oneida, Burning Brides, Cap'n Jazz, Jackie Gleason, The Liars, Train, Paul Schwartz, Saves The Day, Pete Townsend, Maya Angelou, Low, Human League, Mice Parade, Sworn Enemy, Damon & Naomi, Burnt by The Sun, Gym Class Heroes, David Berkeley, Comeback Kid, Grand Master Flash, Strike Anywhere, DJ Soul Slinger, David Shire, Killswitch Engage, Kool And The Gang, Locust, Youth of Today, Between the Buried and Me, God Forbid, Smoothe Da Hustler, Pedro the Lion, Symphony X, Bad Brains, Earth Crisis, Channels, Olivia Tremor Control, Bayside, Twilight Sad, Murphy's Law, Oakley Hall, Lifetime, Unearth...

i'll report back here on how well they end up working out for "Broken Homes in Bexar County" but i'm very optimistic.

hipster runoff, i wish i could quit you.

carles drops some science.

mellencamp on the music biz

John Mellencamp wrote a nice, insightful essay in huffpo today about the record companies and the dire straits they find themselves in. he paints a convincing picture of an industry that became more concerned with the trends in stock prices than trends in american music:

During the late 80s and early 90s the industry underwent a transformation and restructured, catalyzed by three distinct factors. Record companies no longer viewed themselves as conduits for music, but as functions of the manipulations of Wall Street. Companies were acquired, conglomerated, bought and sold; public stock offerings ensued, shareholders met. At this very same time, new Nielsen monitoring systems -- BDS (Broadcast Data Systems) and SoundScan were employed to document record sales and radio airplay. Prior to 1991, the Billboard charts were done by manual research; radio stations and record stores across the country were polled to determine what was on their playlists and what the big sellers were. Thus, giving Oklahoma City, for example, an equivalent voice to Chicago's in terms of potential impact on the music scene. BDS keeps track of gross impressions through an encoded system that counts the number of plays or "spins" that a song receives. That number is, thereafter, multiplied by the number of potential listeners. SoundScan was put in place at retail centers to track sales by monitoring scanned barcodes of units crossing the counter. A formula was devised whereby the charts were based 20% on the SoundScan number and 80% on BDS results. The system had changed from one that measured popularity to one that was driven by population.

"read" the "whole thing", as they say on the blogweb.

just came back from sxsw

it was awesome. made some contacts. next year, by hook or by crook, i'll be performing there.

5 Minutes With The Glib!

my podcast debut.

these guys do a podcast in which they spotlight one band or musician who has requested them or messaged them on myspace. usually to make fun of the band. but they were pretty cool about my stuff!

"keep your eyes peeled" for blueyed son, is what they said. i'm just quoting.

reviewing an album in 140 characters or less

i guess this was inevitable:

I'm going to once again plug my Twitter page 1000TimesYes, where I'm reviewing 1,000 of 2009's new releases by the end of the year. In the tiny gasps for air in between Idolator posts, I am planning to review the new ones from Kelly Clarkson, The-Dream, Richard Swift, Bob Mould, Animal Hospital and MF Doom!

that's christopher r. weingarten of idolator speaking. i guess the lesser-known artists should be grateful for the thousand reviews a year, though! i hope i have the honor of having an album's worth of work reduced to a tweet with a numerical score at the end. (check out the actual twitter feed of the 140-character reviews -- it's incredibly depressing if you take music seriously.)

(also, if you're going to follow someone's tweets, follow mine!)

my podcast debut, yall

i just got the best news i've heard all day - i'm going to be featured in the podcast 5 Minutes With The Glib on March 16 (that's next wednesday). so go subscribe to their feed and check me out! apparently they're going to play a track and then talk about the music in a glib way. so we'll see. it could be a dubious honor.

Mahler's 9th

i realized last night that "little lucy" has a whole lot of the first movement of Mahler's 9th in it, especially the main melody and some of the arrangement (especially when the horn comes in about 2/3 of the way through, after the bridge). take a listen:



i've listened to that piece of music probably a hundred times, but it's been many years since i gave it a spin. and yet, the influence is unmistakable. i am endlessly fascinated at how these bits of musical memory rear their heads during the creative process.

dreaming of the second enlightenment

i don't know how to write this without sounding like whoever/whatever it is that hipster runoff is parodying/imitating ("what kind of 'moment' do yall think we r 'in' right now?"), but this is something i've been thinking over for the past few months.

i don't think anyone would argue that we're going through a large shift in consumer attitudes and taste, which is coinciding with an explosion of at-your-fingertips independent art/music/video. these two phenomena are caught in a sort of feedback loop, and for the moment, it seems to be great news for everyone other than the entertainment dinosaurs who were built to make money in the pre-internet age.

like any other human, i seek historical precedent when it comes to understanding and interpreting current events, but modern history ("modern" = anything after the birth of radio, in my mind) doesn't have a true precedent for the great cultural scramble that the internet and its billions of contributors have unleashed.

the dawn of the television age isn't a useful comparison, i don't think. television is a domineering medium, perfect for fascists -- that is to say, it tells you and shows you, and you must watch and listen. you can turn off the set, but in doing so, you're making a conscious choice to reject the culture that everyone else is embracing, and that mass mega-culture had no real alternatives (until the beatniks inspired the folkies and the folkies inspired the hippies and the beatles got involved and the counterculture exploded, but that's what happens when you have a crushing monoculture and a bumper crop of privileged kids, i guess). anyway, the point is, television is one-way, the very opposite of a democratic medium.

the internet is, of course, the very model of a democratic medium. we've never really had one of these. well, that's not true -- there is historical precedent, but one has to reach way back across the centuries to locate it. the closest i can think of is the explosion of printed materials in the renaissance following the invention of the printing press; this democratization of words and ideas (most crucially, scientific, philosophical, religious and mathematical ideas) was directly responsible for the revolution in western thought known as the Age of Enlightenment.

is this happening again? i like to hope that it is. the availability of information and opinions from unlimited sources and viewpoints can't be anything but a cultural benefit. from what i've observed, certain communities (left-leaning blogs, say) begin trading information and insights very quickly, forming groups that are collectively more intelligent than the sum of their parts. this is happening globally, across every culture, within every category and clique that people choose to identify with.

music (and entertainment in general) is/are being democratized so rapidly that it's nearly impossible to keep up with everything--new music breeds new blogs breed new readers breed new musicians breed new music and on and on. it has the earmarks of a bubble, i suppose, but human creativity isn't a business, and the human creative capacity is without a foreseeable limit, so i don't see any reason to worry (unless you're a record company exec of course!).

massive cultural shifts don't feel so massive when they're happening, but in 20 years time, and certainly in 100 years time, i wonder if people won't look back on this moment as a global renaissance of sorts -- a renaissance not just of music and art and entertainment, but of science and ideas and self-actualization. during the first renaissance, and the first enlightenment, ideas were accessible, and so was art and music and all the rest -- but these were far more accessible if you were part of the landed gentry (that is, if you had a ton of money for leisure and study). the internet has the potential to remove virtually all impediments to human advancement, if one believes (as i do) that exposure to new ideas and new cultures is the starting point for any such advancement.

anyway, it's an incredible time to be alive.

"treetop flyer"

interesting - i heard from someone whose opinion i respect, telling me that "little lucy" reminded him of "treetop flyer" by Stephen Stills. i hadn't heard it before, so i checked it out -- on the surface it's quite a bit different, but i think the lyrics are what touched off that association. it's a great song, though:

coincidentally, i just saw Ray LaMontagne on saturday night live, who i'd heard of a few times but never gotten around to listening to. i liked what i heard - i've been sort of concerned that my voice was a little unusual sounding in today's musical landscape, even for an independent artist, but his voice is not too different from mine, and watching his SNL performance gave me confidence that i'm on the right track and that my music and vocal style have some sort of a reference in the current ecosystem.

so, i'm browsing LaMontagne's wikipedia page this morning, and i notice that he was sort of a normal guy in his twenties with a family in Maine, until he heard a song that made him want to become a musician. the song? "treetop flyer" by Stephen Stills.

interesting, i thought.

finally fixed

blueyedson.com finally redirects back here.

to celebrate, watch this extraordinary example of how to make a great music video for no money.


Winter Gloves - Let Me Drive from Paper Bag Records on Vimeo.

f.u. godaddy

a word to the wise: don't use Go Daddy for your domain hosting, and especially ESPECIALLY don't use their shitty site builder "smart space". use them to purchase domains if you must, but in the future i don't think i'm even going to do that. for the past two days i've basically lost control of the www.blueyedson.com domain because of their infuriating, confusing products. i can't even get a domain that i own to redirect back to this blog, even after consulting their IT people and following their explicit instructions. i bought that domain name; it's mine. it should point where i want it to point, and for some reason, it still doesn't. i made the tragic mistake of trying to upgrade my site by using their services, and now i just want to storm their offices with a chainsaw.

new mp3 hosting

since i joined taxi.com a few weeks ago, i realized that i could just link to the mp3s that i host there instead of constantly fucking with slow-ass zshare.net.

so i fixed the links in the original posts so that the mp3s can be downloaded super-fast and without redirecting to zshare's crappy pages that make you wait for 60 seconds before the file starts downloading. i'll still post unfinished work-in-progress tracks to zshare, mainly because i don't want to clutter up my taxi.com page with all that stuff, but the final mp3s will be secure and easy to access.

i'm also publishing the links here in case anyone wants to catch up. in current track listing order, here are the songs i've completed for "BROKEN HOMES" thus far (and it's worth repeating that these are very good quality, but still unmastered, so some are at different volumes than others, some might sound better on some speakers than other speakers, etc.):

"COCAINE COCAINE" (UNMASTERED)
"LONG WAY OFF" (UNMASTERED)
"HOLD ON TO MY HAND" (UNMASTERED)
"BEXAR COUNTY" (UNMASTERED)
"LITTLE LUCY" (UNMASTERED)

good times

i'm not certain, but i think the odds are about 50-50 that i'll be laid off in two weeks.

"Little Lucy" (unmastered)

here's the full version of "Little Lucy". this recording is probably as good as anything i've ever done.

[[[[[ CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "LITTLE LUCY" (UNMASTERED) ]]]]]

"Bexar County" (unmastered)

full version of "Bexar County". sounds great, i think.

[[[[[ CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "BEXAR COUNTY" (UNMASTERED) ]]]]]

still waiting

still waiting for the radiator to shut the hell up, so here's another instrumental. i'm really, really proud of this one also. this song is called "little lucy".

[[[[[ CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "LITTLE LUCY" (INSTRUMENTAL) ]]]]]

the worst thing about recording vocals at home

is that when the radiator is hissing, you just have to wait for it to finish.

i'll post some instrumentals in the meantime.

i know i haven't posted anything on the blog in a bit, but it's mostly because i've been getting a terrific amount of production done, and i'm thisclose to having everything laid down other than the vocal tracks (which are coming along nicely as well).

here's the instrumental track for "Bexar County" -- it's one of the best i've ever done. the full band sound is pretty incredible.

[[[[[ CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "BEXAR COUNTY" (INSTRUMENTAL) ]]]]]