Celebrating indie* music

 Regular visitors to this site, both of you, might have noticed a couple of tweaks to site layout.

Firstly, at the top of the right-hand column you'll see a little widget called We Bring The Music.

This is an old-fashioned Web Ring. Click on the forward or back arrow and you'll be taken to another musician's website. Somewhere on that page you'll find another instance of this widget when you can step on to the next site in the ring. Or hit random and jump to some cool new music at the touch of a button.

Which brings me onto the next feature, directly below the Web Ring: The Indienet.

This is simply a list of websites or linktrees for a whole bunch of great musicians, mostly folks I've met on threads but there's some IRL friends in there too.

So next time someone bemoans the lack of new music, or that they just can't find it, point them to this page and let that do the heavy listening.

And in the meantime, just click a link and see where you end up.

If you're reading this page on a mobile, it helpfully doesn't show the right-hand panel at all. Scroll down to the bottom and select View Web Version. Then jump into some new music.

* And by 'Indie' I mean really independent, not some post-brit-pop guitar-based sad boy pop.

Not that there's anything wrong with that of course.

Band on a budget - the recording process part 17

Ok, not been a lot of progress recently for various reasons but I shall be doing a little more recording this afternoon and our guitarist is coming over in a couple of weeks to put down some more of his tracks. This will hopefully allow me to finish Words and get on with the rest of the stuff.

In the meantime, have a shufti at some more photos from the session that our drummer has just passed across.

Of Opportunities and Appetites

As some of you may know, at the end of July I took the opportunity to leave my day job. I'd been there a while and as a result I got a reasonable payout - not a retiring-to-the-caribbean type payout, but a don't-need-a-new-job-straightaway kind.
A number of you who knew about this have asked me if I'm going to take this as an opportunity to try and do something professionally (i.e. full time) with the music. Some of you have even tried to persuade me to do so ;¬)

I've given it a lot of thought, and I've sat down and done the maths, and it doesn't add up.
Trying to make a living playing your own music is hard. Really hard. I know a few professional musicians, and I know a couple who are doing it sticking to their own songs. At the end of every month they're scratching around wondering how they're going to pay the rent.
And they're better and more established musicians than me.

Maybe if I was ten years younger, maybe if I didn't have the shared commitments I now have, maybe if I still had the backing from the label, maybe then (in fact probably then) I would have given it a go.

But I'm not, I do and I don't, and, to be frank, I just don't have the appetite for it anymore. I sometimes think that to succeed in the creative business you need a certain kind of delusion that gives you enough self-belief to try and persuade others to believe too. I remember hearing a radio documentary about Bob Dylan years ago where one of his friends explained how Dylan invented a back story for himself; when he went down south he told people that he was already this successful musician in New York, on the verge of breaking into the mainstream.
I don't have that kind of delusion or drive. For the past few years mostly I've just been tired.

So I'll keep doing some open mics, and the acoustic sessions with the double bass, I'll probably keep recording the odd song here and there as well, but actually, at the moment, that's enough.

Of Polls, progress, profits, piracy and portents.

So, the poll closed and the voting public had their say. And very helpful it was too. Half of you said cds, half of you said downloads (approximately). So based on that i am absolutely no further down my decision path. I think i would need a larger sample size but, as i shall come to, it no longer matters.

Progress on the album has leapt forward despite my recent, resurgent cold. We've had Adam in giving the skins a battering, Hils has been back in demonstrating more of her multi-instrumentalist skills and we've also had Mr Chisolm and his banjo joining in the shenanigans.
There's still about half a dozen things left to record and then we're into mixing and mastering; which seems to involve Stew and I getting ever more picky about 64ths of a second until we have to go outside and remind ourselves what the sun looks like. But it's still kind of fun...

Anyway, once we've got the songs finished we've got to decide what to do with them. Or rather, we've decided what to do with them. You see the problem is, people just aren't buying cds any more. Not just my cd i should point out! Even good stuff isn't selling in that format.
And for a tiny label like SOUP they just can't afford the up-front costs of runs of cds and then sitting on the boxes. Basically the profit margin isn't there. And it's not like we can rely on the download sales to offset the initial cost, after the VAT man and Apple have had their chunk there isn't a great deal left.
So sorry to all those folks who were hoping for a cd but unless i can figure out a cheap way of producing a high quality short run, then it's soft copy only from now on.

So why aren't cds selling anymore? Is it because of music piracy? Should we all be rushing out to petition the government to run the digital britain bill through the house as quickly as possible? Should we bollox. It's got bugger all to do with piracy. The buying public has moved on, that's what's happened and we have to move with it. What we should be doing is petitioning our MPs not to sign the digital britain bill because it's a bog-awful piece of knee-jerk, lobbyist-led legislation that cannot be currently implemented and can be abused in the future.
But that's probably a different blog...

And what of our 5th alliteration? Well, i reckon there's two sides to that. Firstly, if musicians can't make money on hard-copy sales and (perversely) there's not enough return on soft-copy sales then you've got to expect gig prices to go up. Or the quality of music to go down i guess, but i doubt it's that straightforward.
But return on investment will have to come from somewhere (and don't give me that "sell t-shirts and signed records" shite; that's for established bands only i'm afraid, otherwise it's just more upfront investment and capital tied up in stock).
Secondly little labels like ours will leave the market, they'll concentrate on areas that will guarantee a living. This, i think, would be a bad thing as it will just further the gap between the major label artists and the bedroom amateurs.

Well, that's tonight's depressing blog. Just remember the good stuff! Album's into the finishing straight now, one day soon we will be finished.
Oh yes, and we're playing at Verve in Leeds on the 15th of april so if you're in the vicinity why not pop in. While it's still free...

Rhythm Section Wanted

For the past 18 months I've been working with Dr Jones on the cello and, by all accounts, that's going pretty well. We've just opened the Limetree festival and, over the past couple of years, have played supports to the likes of Great Lakes Swimmers, Langhorne Slim, Stewboss and Martin Stephenson. The first full length album with Soup records is in the works and will be out around the end of the year.
Did i say it was going pretty well?
It's going very well.
But it's time for the next step, you see, there are some songs that just don't work that well on acoustic guitar and cello. They need a bit of rhythm. Specifically they need a double bass and a drum. Maybe more than 1 drum.

So this is, in the words of They Might Be Giants, the rhythm section want ad:
Double Bass player and drummer wanted, based in the York / Leeds area, to support singer/songwriter and cellist for recording and live gigs.
You will have kit, transport, time and a genuine interest in my kind of music. I have the songs and the recording deal.

A lot of what we do is completely acoustic, so if you're looking to rock out, well, I'm sure there are plenty of other bands who'll snap you up. If you're still curious, check out www.drewstephenson.com and www.myspace.com/blindddrewsmusic and drop me a line.