Category: #music

Eight Years of Gloom

jamie

The past 8 years have been a hard road. A lot of loss. A bunch of struggle and worry. Thanks to the pandemic, it seems like the whole world has been living under a shadow of gloom and doom, and me…I’ve been hiding under a rock, keeping my head down. Crazy fucking times. I rarely go anywhere anymore. Who can afford it anyway?

Strong emotions and insane politics tend to bring the muses round over here. A lot of new songs have come my way during the half-decade of torment, though I’ve been too distracted by my life to really bring any of them to into their own. I think some are pretty good, grain of salt, being my own post traumatic opinion. But I hope you’ll agree, as I share the songs, and some of the process, in the coming weeks.

I took up the bass, I’ve been playing electric guitar a LOT, and still working on making midi my bitch. I have a bunch of elaborate arrangements fighting for a chance to be recorded. I’m such a perfectionist, those will take time. I’ve been trying, but never seem to make much progress.

Well now, I’m tired of waiting. I want you to hear the songs. So, I’m gonna share the songs, raw, as they were written. I write most stuff on an old six string acoustic. That’s where everything starts. The roots of the song. Where everything the song will ever be already exists, hiding amongst the crude bangings and ringing open strings, with no distracting background vocals.

So later, when the ‘album version’ drops (not too much later, hopefully), we can all look back and say, “Why the fuck did you do THAT to it, man?!”.

Stay tuned. ~jamie

Guitar practice (in space)

jamie

From a live session on TikTok and since I spent way too much time making the video effects, I figured I may as well share it out. Sound is iffy, mastering by me, so not really, and the backing track gets annoyingly repetitive, but every once in awhile I hit a couple cool riffs in a row.

Enjoy. Or hit mute. idc

#TikTokLive #livestream #music

First Do No Harm

jamie

I’ve never understood why people want to become famous. Being famous means you can’t be yourself. You give up being ordinary. At least you used to. Ordinary people get pretty famous nowadays.

The Internet has changed the meaning of fame. You can have millions of followers (I don’t, but some people do) and still be pretty ordinary; obscure, in terms of the public eye.  You know…Including all those other people who are too good to Google. Too cool for TikTok.  For the rest of us, it’s sort of a golden age in a way. If you’re on the right apps, that is. If the Government doesn’t take them away because they’re afraid of the power we have.

What I want to know is where is the true music underground? The next breakout sound is out there, in some garage or dive bar. A bigger than life, but authentic scene. Where the music speaks the truth and the true seeds of destiny will spring. Not about the industry or money or fame. Music has the power to change. To change Us.

I’m a libertarian at heart. You don’t need a bunch of rules if you follow just one: first do no harm. When the industry is killing the product, the industry needs to change. The money is literally killing the music.

They will exploit us until we refuse to be exploited. Then they’ll find a new way to exploit us.

#FuckTicketmaster

jamie

#FuckTicketmaster. Ticketmaster and Live Nation are a scalper monopoly. A drain on the music industry, adding nothing except fees and problems.

The best two things we could do to fix ticket sales are:
1 – Outlaw resale markup beyond a small, fixed percentage
2 – Implement a decentralized online sales system, that puts control in the hands of the venue, not the scalpers.

We easily bypass the Ticketmaster / Live Nation monopoly, and instead give venues an open source, distributed sales system that allows the venue to sell tickets themselves.

Venue could be pay once to buy the software or pay a monthly fee, and split the ticket sales with the artists, cutting out the scalpers altogether. Artists and Venues get to split 100% of the door, and nobody gets raped by surprise 35% “convenience fees” at checkout.

I’ll be happy to design the system if someone wants to pay for it’s development. Who’s in?

Authors Note: All opinions expressed here are just that: opinions. If you don’t like mine, I probably won’t like yours either. Let’s just nod, and walk away. Maybe come back with solutions instead of opinions. Because of the two, only solutions actually matter.