Tech Troubles, Automated Attachements

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_addiction_disorder

So I open up my MacBook to write this post and lo', behold!, the mouse button is sticking and the computer itself will not charge. Realizing I had to pack up the nice work area I'd carved out for myself in the coffee shop brought about a sense of rage, deep inside, that I had yet to feel in my lifetime until this very moment. I soon realized this rage was not because I was required to relocate to the public library (where I am currently seated and not a bad place if you never go), but because my access to a technology that I have been taking for granted for the past 2 years was suddenly cut-off, cold turkey. It brought to light just how much we take tech for granted and are attached to our automated arenas in life.

Music and technology have become inextricably joined at the hip now for at least 20 years. I wonder how our newly found human attachment for screens and buttons (read: iPod) affect our listener-ship. The main question, which analysts have been pondering since Mp3's came around, concerns the next step in recorded music media. We all know the historical transition from phonograph to 8-track (the unfortunate butt of many jokes), tape to CD, and ultimately CD to Mp3's. No one doubts that the "album-as-a-whole-experience" was destroyed by the digitization of music on the internet. Singles are popular and most people are unwilling to buy a whole album for just one song (which you used to have to do at your local record store).

But as Frogs Gone Fishin' puts the finishing touches on the tracking stage of our forthcoming album, we are left to wonder exactly how (CD?, iTunes?, our website?, little green Frog-themed flash drives?) to release our music to the masses.

While we ponder our methods, check out a preview of the album here. I gotta go schedule an appointment with an Apple Genius. I'll ask him about the future of music distribution and get back to you...

TOUR PHOTOS

Pics from last couple years of tour...

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Come From the Land of Ice and Snow

The Frogs are driving up the hill to Breckenridge for an opening ski-weekend date with our good friends from New Orleans, Johnny Sketch and The Dirty Notes. The snow is falling and the flakes are huge, covering cases and clothing as we load equipment into the car for the ride to the show. Johnny Sketch and his Dirty Notes plan meticulously while traveling on tour through such treacherous weather; New Orleans is drastically different in terms of the driving skills necessary to navigate a 16-passenger van and attached trailer through the curvy, icy mountain passes on Interstate 70. Winter in Colorado is oftentimes very inhospitable. Growing up here, I’ve often wondered if all of the overturned semi’s and avalanche victims (the most in the country) warrant our obsession with snow. Try posing that question to the determined people occupying the long line of cars adjacent to us, heading eastbound toward Denver after a full day of early-season skiing.

Winter is big business in Colorado. The influx of tourist dollars and international business keeps the Vail Valley on the list of top resort areas in the world every year and keeps state tax coffers satiated. Despite the freezing temperatures, dangerous driving, I-70 closures (just pulled up to our own line of westbound traffic), and the requisite carrying heavy speakers on ice-caked concrete at 2:30am after the show, the Frogs are stoked for winter just like everybody else.

Along with those tourist dollars and an international travel contingent which serves as its own form of viral publicity when visitors return home with a Frogs CD in tow, comes better attended shows and more money flowing through the door for the band.

Thor’s hammer is being raised for the first time tonight as temperatures dip to their lowest level of the year. Back on the eastbound side of the highway, people have put their cars in park and are standing in small groups, talking of the ski day or crappy weather causing the current gridlock. We continue to cruise, a constant mist of white jets back at our windshield from the smaller cars in front of us. The gears of winter are being greased, the season is here.

WTF People?!?

After a string of shootings in places far, and way too near to myself and loved ones, I have only one question to ask.

WTF America?

Gun violence is nothing new, even in (typically) quiet, suburban Denver. I can still vividly remember that day, before school lock-downs were commonplace, when our middle school class was told that students had been shot right down the road at Columbine High School.

Gun culture has always been pervasive in our society. The American Revolution, Frontiersman and Settlers, Cowboys and Indians, GI Joe... the list goes on. All of these inherently American institutions involve fire-arms and I don't see the trend going away any time soon. The NRA, military-industrial complex and a strong Washington gun lobby will make sure that gats and 9's are here to stay.

But still, WTF last week??? First, a psychologist goes psycho on those he was sworn to help at a military base in Texas. A laid-off engineer in Florida goes ballistic. A recent college grad gets shot in the chest in the Denver suburbs. A 20-year local in Vail lets loose with a hand-cannon in a bar. Not to mention a hostage situation at the same hour that night, just down the road in Beaver Creek, and a Seattle police shooting which occurred just as officers were filing out of a funeral for the last police officer who was slain.

I've never been a sensationalist and I do think the media over-covers negative news. But I think several of the events mentioned above hit a little close to home last week. Our band, Frogs Gone Fishin', played at the very bar where the Vail shooting occurred, exactly one week beforehand. The dude who was murdered in South Denver lived less than a mile from my house. Oh yeah, he played guitar and was in my high school graduating class, too.

I believe serious thought needs to be applied to gun control by the Obama administration. In the past, his attorney general has said there are "only a few gun related changes we'd like to make". And of course, I'm all for people doing whatever, and I mean whatever, they like to do. But let's think about our society and how all of us are prone to make momentary mistakes which we later regret. Mistakes made with guns, however, are oftentimes irreversible.

Tennessee Travels

I'm going to visit my girlfriend, Mackenzie, next month. We don't get to see each other much, which is a shame considering that I think she is the most beautiful girl in the world. We get to spend, at most, five or six days out of every couple months together. Pretty tough. Beyond being beautiful, she's also really cool and understanding, understanding enough to let me play a show while in Tennessee during one of our precious few nights together. Not only does she understand, she's excited for the gig. I might even make her sing (oh yeah... she sings, paints, writes, and plays guitar...and piano).

She didn't even think I'd write this post and makes fun of me for having a blog and Twitter account. But, even if I wanted it to be, nothing can be compartmentalized these days. For better or for worse, these are not the old days of rock and roll. Take the 80's, for example. In the height of debauchery and misogyny in rock, Gene Simmons of KISS could wake up at his house, eat his favorite cereal for breakfast and lead a normal life, relatively speaking. At night, Gene would paint himself white and black and adopt a personae which included a bleeding tongue, completely removed from who he was while eating Wheaties that same morning.

There are still performers who enjoy the luxury of being someone completely different on-stage and in the public eye. The internet makes things too transparent for this division between public and private to stay firmly planted, however. Few bands manage to shield their personal lives effectively enough to achieve that sort of mystery. TOOL is one that comes to mind. Few pictures of the band's faces exist online. My band isn't like that, nor would I ever want it to be.

The point is that in 2009, nobody can, or should restrict themselves to one domain anymore in terms of what they choose to do, or how they market it. The internet makes this process more invasive, and less comfortable. Maybe Mackenzie is even blushing right now (she has sexy, porcelain skin that doesn't hide these things very well). I know she will do well as an artist because she doesn't restrict herself to JUST painting, or JUST writing. Next comes the marketing part for her.

Now I just need to convince her to get a blog, maybe a Twitter account...



Frogs Gone Fishin' are in Evergroove Studio this week, recording guitars for the new album. FgF is also playing in Avon, CO @ Finnigan's Wake tomorrow night. Film-maker Travis Milloy will be following myself and Andrew Portwood as we record all day, play all night.

On The Road Again

Well not really... the proverbial blogging road, maybe. The point is I now, thankfully, have enough time to do what I really love to do: write, write music, and in general have the time to do what all artists need to do to succeed, namely taking the time to observe the world and enjoy diverse experiences, experiences which are interpreted again later, in the form of relevant art output.

If anything, that is what the last year since graduating college has taught me. The more I try different jobs, whether running an independent promotion company, competing in the ferocious music industry jungle or working with special-needs children at an elementary school, the more I realize that I just want to be an artist, a musician who spends the majority of his time on music, not hoping that one day my part-time focus, music, will somehow overtake other jobs with more money and security. IF YOU WANT MUSIC TO BE YOUR FULL-TIME JOB, IT HAS TO BE YOUR FULL TIME JOB.

Creating, organizing, running, and executing a promotion company and its associated festival, Mountainside Mardi Gras at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, was one of the most intense experiences of my life. The pressure, risk/reward and fickle nature of the music industry makes it one of the most unpredictable industries in the world. Mountainside Mardi Gras took place on Aug. 8th, 2009 and the outcome of all our hard work and vision can be seen in multiple lights. On one had, 1,500 people showed up that day. That's a lot of people. But not nearly enough for us to have broken even and kept For/Sure Productions afloat.

Sometimes every fiber in my body tells me to find capital, refinance the company, have another go. I'm sure it'll happen at some point in the future, but I am just now, four months after the fact, understanding the impact and implications of what we did that day at Red Rocks. For me personally, the concert had many benefits which ultimately outweighed the ocean-sized financial bath FSP endured in August. We brought enough artists from NOLA to CO at one time to make residents of New Orleans wonder if all the musicians in town had just packed up and left for good. I had the amazing opportunity of playing alongside the world-renowned Dirty Dozen Brass Band and my good friends CR Gruver (Polytoxic, Outformation) and DJ Logic, spinning on the other side of the stage. If in the past you told me I would play music onstage at Red Rocks at the age of 23, I might have slapped you silly, right across your mouth.

And so there I was, a young entrepreneur with respect and love from the musical communities in Denver and New Orleans and that much richer... in contacts and networking, certainly not in money. I was disgruntled with the outcome of the festival, although the vast majority of festivals around the world lose money in their first year. Shortly after, Frogs Gone Fishin's first record deal with Oh/Ya Records dissolved, before we could secure financing for a second album.

Losing the deal with Oh/Ya seemed to be a fatal blow to the band. Without money to make a new record, everything started to seem redundant because no new music, fresh material, could be presented to our fans. Frogs canceled tour to the Northwest, an area I was particularly excited about absorbing. I moved deep into the mountains, 2.5 hours from Denver to a tiny town called Gypsum and actually employed my college degree in a productive way by getting a job teaching Special Ed at an elementary school. I wanted to get away from Denver, a city which we are just now starting to break, as Frogs. I moved in with a Buddhist songwriter and his family and worked hard from 7 in the morning t0 3pm, every day. This became exhausting. After Frogs would finish a show at 2am in Denver or Boulder, I would proceed to drive, tired, back up the mountain for two and a half hours, before getting up mere hours later to go work with kids.

It goes without saying that working with cognitive-needs children is challenging. I'm going to write a separate post about this altogether because the amount you pick-up and learn as their advocate is impressive and wondrous, while conflicting factors outside of the school can make the job impossible, to say the least.

Just when I was positive I was going to perish on the roadside from exhaustion by driving the 200 miles between Gypsum and Denver in the middle of the night, every other night or so, a miracle happened for Frogs Gone Fishin'. Our friend and adept producer at Evergroove Studio, Brad Smalling announced that he and an attorney wished to start a record label and sign FGF as their only flagship act. This divine act set into motion the wheels of a new album and a tour in the Spring, reversing the gloom that had settled in early Fall.

Another great relationship has developed between Frogs and movie maker Travis Milloy, whose recent picture, Pandorum, hit theatres a couple weeks ago. He will be shooting a music video for Frogs, starting this weekend on Saturday at Finnigan's Wake in Avon, CO. Incidentally our largest fan base, by far, is in the High Rockies, Vail and the surrounding area (Avon, Edwards, Eagle). Given the opportunity for great recreation in a beautiful landscape setting, we're not complaining. Ski season is upon us, after all.

Frogs couldn't be more excited to release a follow-up to Tell Me True in the first part of the new year and get on the road again to 14 states in two months. Tour is a part of my life which I cannot deny; it calls me from down South to hop in the TOURMOBILE and get after it.

I'm working on a number of other projects, the most exciting of which is the opportunity to compose the soundtrack to a monster movie being filmed in CO next year.

Remember to wear sunscreen and stay hydrated people, we'll see you out there on the road...