Winter Update

Singing some songwriting in Nashville.

Apologies for neglecting the blogosphere for the past month! Life in Colorado has been so busy, yet strangely comfortable, that maybe I haven't felt the need to relate the woes of tour life to the public. I wanted to highlight some things that Frogs Gone Fishin', For/Sure Productions and myself will be up to in the coming months, so I can get back to more esoteric musings about that crazy thing called the music business.

I've been in Nashville since Monday; Portwood (guitar, FGF) and I had a hellish time spending 12 hours in the Tourmobile trying to make it back to Denver after a two-day mountain run, followed by a 6am flight to Tennessee for an acoustic gig at the venerable 3rd and Lindsley.

After all the smack I've talked about this town in previous posts, you are probably wondering why I would forgo three precious days (out of only two months) in Colorado to head back out on the road (to Cashville of all places...). We do have some very good friends here. But, the real answer lies in an ongoing strategy to try and promote our music in every way possible, outside of the two or three shows a week FGF plays. Portwood and I played acoustic versions of around 15 Frogs songs on Monday night and closed for a well know band, popular in the 90's, called Blessid Union of Souls. You will certainly remember hearing this song from pop radio, circa 1996. The Blessid guys seemed in good spirits, despite a notable decline in their popularity since the 90's: a good example of the absurdity of radio and record label inflation in the 80's/90's.

Promoting our music also means doing interviews and making sure our album is available to the public in as many ways as possible, a task mostly undertaken by Oh/Ya Records.

In the promotion company realm, For/Sure Productions is very busy contracting bands and artwork for Mountainside Mardi Gras which will be officially announced sometime in January or February next year. I'm learning a lot about artwork and design by interacting with our artists at Right On studios in New York. They are doing a lot to aid me with my visually based inadequacies.

In my personal pursuit of writing more (the recent lack of blog postings excepted), I've applied to write about the CO music scene at a hip publication based in Denver. I'd love to expand my writing scope in this way. Blogging is great and a great way to let your community know what is happening in your life and work. Assignments coming down from an editor at a magazine would be a different challenge altogether and probably limit some of the more jaded opinions I have about the industry from coming out. I would be focusing on bands and their music instead, which is really all that should matter to me from an artistic perspective.

I use that perspective to keep perspective on my life as a musician, promoter and (hopefully) writer. Or as Kenny Rogers put it:

"I Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition Was In"

Next post, an interview with Ivan Neville of Dumpstaphunk.

Tour... Check!

Frogs Gone Fishin' rolled into Denver on Saturday, weary and tired from 50 days on the road. The mountains have never looked so good. Traveling west on I-70, you don't see the distant purple outline of the Front Range until you are well inside Colorado, a beacon for your arrival in Denver.

The final driving leg of tour was particularly grueling, 23 hours and 1,141 miles in the car after our last gig in Asheville, NC. We stopped for a Halloween get-together with our friends Kinetix, another Denver-based band, in Columbia, MO. Switching off in the driver's seat every three to four hours, I drove the 6 30am shift through that less-than-scenic neighbor state, Kansas. The sunrise over the cornfields was pink and inviting as we approached the Colorado border.

We've had a short break from music since Saturday, but rehearsed yesterday in preparation for our homecoming gig in Boulder tonight at The Fox Theater. This will be our biggest show in Colorado to date, and we couldn't be more excited. We'll have more of an extended break from touring through the winter, as we plan on playing shows within Colorado until we depart for New Orleans for another semi-permanent stay in February.

Some highlights of tour included:

- Making it to Flagstaff for the first gig of tour, after our car failed to start in New Mexico.
- Discovering Bar PM in Lubbock, TX. They treated us well and the kids at Tech know how to get down.
- Austin City Limits (I scored a free ticket!).
- Helping people in Houston feel some sense of normalcy after Hurricane Gustav wreaked havoc on their city. (After going through Katrina in NOLA, I could relate).
- Discovering Lake Charles, LA.
- Everything in New Orleans, always. See the post here for a more complete write-up.
- Playing for the debate watch party in Nashville. For a town as conservative as Nashville, the Democrats really know how to party and get behind their candidate.
- The surprisingly chill atmosphere and creative energy of Dubuque, Iowa.
- Carbondale and Normal, Illinois. Cool people all over Illinois.
- Staying at Carl the sound guy's house in Minneapolis. This house is filled with musicians, sound-guys, light-guys, creativity and energy. A house like this would benefit the music scene in any city.
- Too many car-bombs at the Irish pub show in Milwaukee.
- Thanksgiving dinner, prepared for us in Green Bay.
- Going to sleep back in Nashville after driving straight from Green Bay.
- Collaborating with our friends DJ Bowls and The Green Horns in Tennessee.
- The hotel room in Kentucky, a luxury so late in tour.
- Discovering North Carolina and Asheville, a heady town in a beautiful state.
- The first glimpse of our beautiful home under the mountains, Denver.

To distill all the events and faces of tour down to such a simple list would betray tour itself. In private we will thank everyone that fed, housed, helped, handled, handed-down, and tolerated us for their hospitality.

It takes me several days to adjust to life at home after tour. Sleeping in a bed, eating regular meals and interacting with the same set of people everyday outside of the band all feel awkward. Driving a car less than 30 feet long feels like driving a go-kart. The show tomorrow night at The Fox will help ease us back into the routine... We get to see all our friends at once.

Nashville Collaborations

Nashville is a microcosm. The city is surprisingly similar to New York and L.A., though much smaller in population. In Nashville, artists "break" and are glorified as if they were nationally known celebrities, despite the fact that their presence is nary felt worldwide, as an artist "breaking" out of L.A. or NYC would surely enjoy. In New York there are enough people, both music industry people and music fans who support the industry, to provide a scene where the interests of fans dictate the industry. Artists become popular because lots of people want to see their shows and buy their records.

In Nashville, a large portion of the population are music industry people themselves. They must serve the dual purpose of music industry person and music fan alike. This creates a huge cyclical process involving songwriters, publishers, performers, record labels, management companies, marketing agencies, distributors and unfortunately, you and me as music listeners, who are subject to the whim of much higher forces before our taste in music is accounted for. In Nashville, this process has created a town totally interdependent on itself where the process cannot be escaped.

For example, the morning after our show in Nashville I was patronizing my favorite corporate coffee shop with a green logo (don't say the S word, hipsters might attack). I'm standing in line and out of nowhere comes a guy, obviously more caffeinated than I at this point, who is annoyingly interested in why I'm wearing sweatpants and a headband, looking tired at 10am on a Thursday morning. Telling him about the show the night before was my first and last mistake. My new acquaintance launches into a rehearsed spiel about his various "involvements" with the music industry here in town. This is curious, as upon receiving his business card I silently notice the Heating/Plumbing Specialist title below Joe the Plumber's name. By this time I had coffee in hand but, before I could reach the door, Joe was already introducing me to another "music industry" friend of his. At least this second dude recognized Frogs Gone Fishin' (always a nice surprise), and wasn't trying to immediately pedal his imaginary musical wares on me.

This story illustrates an interaction that goes down thousands of times a day in Nashville, between thousands of people who have something to do with music which most likely has nothing to do with actually playing music itself. This may not be the case for long. A simple comparison might illustrate why.

If I, Trevor Jones, wanted to write a song and make it available for public consumption, I would:
1. Sit in my room with acoustic guitar, write something I think people will connect with.
2. Record the song for free with band (they realize shared profit potential and record for free), on free software that came with my computer. Little gadget to make the mics sound good cost $100.
3. Mix and place the song on Myspace, ReverbNation, iTunes, or any of the thousands of online music distributors. Leave the consumption part up to popular opinion and keep all the profit and recognition for a mammoth one-time recording cost of a hundred clams.

If Travis Jones, the aspiring Nashville-star in the making, wants to write a song and make it available for public consumption the traditional Nashville way, he would:
1. Select a song written by a songwriter, through a publisher. In doing so, he has already given away any profit potential for the song (a 50/50 split, songwriter/publisher).
2. Get an advance from the record label (Travis is now in debt) for a good studio (no respectable country album is recorded at home!), and a band (who he must pay because, just like him, the band only profits one time from the recording session). Most likely it's a completely different band than the one which he will pay to play the songs live on the road.
3. The record label will then spend even more money (also recoupable from Travis) to target-market and distribute the album in physical record stores, along with commercials and physical ads. Consumption is left up to known market factors (14 year olds who the suits know will buy records and almost certainly disregard the same artist by the time they are in college). While Travis will receive recognition for his efforts, he will be left in debt to a controlling record label.

If I seem biased against Nashville, it is really a bias against the outdated way many talented, but misguided musicians continue to willfully participate in their own demise. If any aspiring musicians are reading this, please: BOOK YOUR OWN SHOWS, WRITE YOUR OWN MUSIC, OWN YOUR OWN COPYRIGHTS!

But, if these concepts seem so axiomatic to me, why does Nashville continue to be a bastion of the old-world way? The answer lies in the above comparison. It takes me several hundred dollars and five people to make and distribute a song. It takes Travis in Nashville many thousands of dollars and dozens of people with interests other than his own to make same said, sad song.

It is the hubris of these same thousands of dollars and masses of people employed by the music industry which has kept Nashville antiquated. In fact, the downfall of this whole scenario is sitting in your lap or on your desk right now.

When CD's came out, the industry made millions just because people had to replace their cassettes, just as they had to replace 8-tracks and vinyl before that. Now that it is hard to imagine anything more convenient than an Mp3, the record industry is struggling to find a way to make money on such an intangible medium.

I suppose writing this post has made me feel better about Nashville. I'll admit there is a wealth of creativity and talent here, even if it is segmented and calcified within this evil industry process we've been talking about.

Frogs Gone Fishin' was lucky enough to have our friends DJ Bowls and the Green Horns horn section at our Nashville show. These collaborations help take our live show to the next level.

While this emerging, "new-world" music industry does have lots of benefits for independent artists like Frogs Gone Fishin', it has downsides and uncertainties, as well. More about that next time....