One Year To Live - Month Three

Posted on July 2, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | |

I wrote a post called One Year to Live a few months ago, and I just thought I’d give an update on how this exercise has changed my life so far, as well as use this opportunity to explain my absence here over the last month.

The big news thus far is that we are preparing to move to Kentucky from Seattle at the beginning of September. This is really a huge deal and a major undertaking, as you might imagine. We spent a few days last week traveling around Kentucky and Tennessee visiting family and looking at houses before finally deciding to move into my grandmother’s old house in Mayfield, the town where I was born 37 years ago.

I left KY about 12 years ago and moved to Seattle, and my wife is a Seattle area native, so this is a big change for both of us, although in the end I think it will be a great change of pace for us. We’ve lived in a tiny little house for the past 10 years, doing OK but never getting ahead due to the high cost of living here. Now that I make decent money and have a boss that is willing to let me telecommute full-time, we should be able to live really well in KY, where the cost of living is a fraction of what it is here.

Most of my family lives within easy driving distance, and my oldest son is currently in Nashville, so it will be good to reconnect with the people that matter most to me. It hit me pretty hard when my grandmother passed in November of 2006 because I hadn’t seen her in probably 8 years. I don’t want to live that regret again by continuing to live so far out of reach of my loved ones.

The other cool aspect of this move is the proximity to Nashville. While Seattle does have a decent music scene, I really think Nashville is going to give me the greatest opportunities as an artist, given my country roots.

All and all, I am excited about the future and the ability to kind of reset and refocus my life on the things that really matter. That’s really what the “one year to live” exercise is about.

I’ve also slowly been working on Clif.tv, which is still very much a work in progress. I’ve been writing a bit and recently finished a song called How Beautiful She Is that I am happy with. Since I will lose the daily commute and gain about 2 hours a day after the move, I hope to use that time to get a lot more writing and recording done once we’ve settled in.

That’s about it. I’ll give another update once we’re planted in the Bluegrass State. Thanks for listening. :)

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Nothing New Under the Sun

Posted on May 21, 2008
Filed Under Now What? | |

There has been an interesting disturbance in the music world over the last few months. Seems like music industry news is full of major acts trying “new” approaches of marketing and distributing music. Giving it away, creating multiple levels of product offerings, using new sites and technologies to get their music out.

Bob Baker’s recent post on the New Indie Music Gatekeepers got me thinking again though. There’s a quote from Nathan Lilly about it being “harder to go out and do the classic D.I.Y. thing.” Here’s a clip of my response:

Folk singers booking house concerts, playing without amplification, selling handmade CDs, eating potluck and sleeping on couches… that’s where DIY went.

So here’s a couple of thoughts that have been brewing in my head. It seems Trent Reznor is actually borrowing from the D.I.Y. ethic a bit - releasing albums himself on his own terms. And giving away music isn’t new - most of us true indie musicians have been doing it forever. Variable pricing models (pay what you will) isn’t new either - ever ran a merch table? Multiple product levels (ala NIN Ghosts) - not new - the book industry has proven that model. Using fan micro-investments to fund recording projects - I had folky friends offering song sponsorships a dozen years ago.

Every time something comes into my email or feed reader about some “new” strategy, I find myself thinking about someone I knew who did the same thing a decade ago. And 90% of the time those forward-thinking musicians were folkies - singer-songwriter types creating their own venues while others complained about how there were less and less places to play. Troubadors setting up networks for nation-wide tours of living rooms! New-age old-religion acts offering to add your name to the liner notes for sponsoring a song or buying an album in advance.

How could it be that these artists were decades ahead of today’s new music strategies? Simple: they had no system to rely on. There was no illusion that you were going to get signed for the clever songs about the Iditarod trail. There was no expectation that the radio would play your song about old growth forests. Folk artists - true indie artists - had to be pioneers to get beyond the corner coffee shop.

I think the current rash of “new ideas” are due to the collapsing music infrastructure. Everyone is now in the same boat - trying to make a living in a system that doesn’t work any more. Artists and labels have to “innovate” to survive. And I think it’s a good thing.

But then again, it’s nothing us folkies and true indie artists haven’t been doing for decades.

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