Nuts

Things have been nuts lately. Last week I played with two groups, The Sessh and Frogs Gone Fishin', in Aspen for over 250 people... on a Monday! This was all after headlining gorgeous State Bridge Amphitheater for our good friends and fans near Vail on Sunday.

Frogs have acquired a wonderful booking agent, Ryan Williams, and are making headway in new Colorado markets like during night's show at the Belly Up and an upcoming bill on 9/11 at the venerable Mishiwaka Amphitheater in northern Colorado. We'll open up for Bill Kruetzman's (drums, Grateful Dead) new project at the Gothic Theater with a favorite bass player of mine, George Porter Jr. (Meters) outta New Orleans. After that we'll head toward Joplin, MO to play a benefit for the victims of the tornado disaster there. Having evacuated New Orleans for Katrina in 2005, I'm acutely aware of the struggle and sadness that natural disaster can bring. Music not only helped, but saved New Orleans after Katrina and I'm positive it will help Joplin. In October we'll head out on our most ambitious tour in almost half a decade, all the way to New York City to tour the region and rock out on Halloween in a city full of year-round characters. My electronic-funk group The Sessh will be releasing recorded music soon and will tour Europe in 2012.

All of this booking requires a commitment to risk and entrepreneurship that is comforting during a time when corporations seem to be reluctant to hire, the unemployment rate is relatively speaking, very high, and the financial markets are struggling. Factors outside of my control have a tougher time influencing the outcome of our business. There is no market or instrument attached to music, only a quotient of people's desire for entertainment (high during times of financial strain) and our desire to succeed (high when you're a [literally] starving artist).

Now now, I'm not really starving. I had salmon for dinner tonight. It was delicious. And we aren't in some doomsday scenario where people go to the bar and drink and dance because the financial excrement is hitting the global fan and all they want to do is forget their lives. We still control our destiny. I am my own boss, as are many people, and that feels great. But you have to watch any stagnation. Getting comfortable isn't an option. Calcification in any moving system is the beginning of the end. I'm planning on taking a break from music for a month in December and traveling to India to gain perspective about my life and station here in the US, study the beautiful, holy and ancient tonal relationships in the music of the sitar and walk the path that my personal spiritual leader, Buddha, did in during his lifetime in the northeastern part of the country.

I know what you're thinking. How unremarkable and cliche: 25 year old, bearded American rock musician goes to India seeking enlightenment and musical guru. But I'm going because I know it will have an impact on me whether I like it or not, whether I want to let India in or not, all I've heard and read is that it will assault your senses. Pretty nuts.

The Indian system and way of thinking is foreign, if not unnecessary for America, but I wouldn't stop short of saying we need an attitude adjustment. We need to stop pinning our newfound waning hegemony on our leaders and start businesses, make some money and create jobs ourselves instead of waiting around for the job market to get better. I think the media plays poorly into this, reporting ever increasing joblessness, as if we are to take a rise of .3 percentage points as cause to stop looking for jobs altogether. Income can come from different sources and the idea that our white-collar-with-benefits world would last forever, while giving illegal immigrants the jobs white America didn't want, was ludicrous. We are all taught that it's better to make a living with your skill set in Microsoft Office when there are roads to be built, bridges to be fixed and a new "green" infrastructure to create for a sustainable world. But green business isn't yet profitable and so the seemingly obvious pairing of joblessness with new green jobs is shattered by the very thing shattering our perceived hegemony: greed.

When we start looking at a sustainability index instead of a consumer confidence index, we'll be living in a better world. Life is a zero-sum game on Earth. Our quest for "growth" every year as an index of economic health is bringing about our demise quicker than we can ever predict. There is a beautiful alignment between saving our world financially and environmentally, if only we could get our leaders to do what us entrepreneurs do daily: take risks.

Fame...

...doesn't exist. Not anymore. Not in music anyway. Sure you have your Bieber's and your GaGa's, but that's it. Popular music is crap. It's all about micro-markets now, small niches of people who support artists through rabid technology use and word of mouth.

Movies are different. We still have superstars of the screen. Bogarts and Grants gave way to Cloonies and Pitts who gave way to Ledgers and Blooms and all the while nobody has figured out how to effectively deliver free, high-quality movies to the public and destroy the business model with free content on the internet. Sure you can stream movies for free on the internet, just like music, but it's time consuming and the quality is questionable. Our ears can hear a quality difference between digital formats up until a certain point, higher than the 128k/s standard for MP3's to be sure, but not much higher. Movies look surreal at 1080hd and once you've experienced that, anything lesser looks grainy.

Netflix knew this. They also know that all the movies I REALLY want to watch, are on DVD only and come in the mail (an extra two whole bucks a month!). They took what they knew to be the future of distributing content and owned it, made it profitable.

In comparison, the music industry looked like a fat man drowning in a lake, weighed down by his physical inventory and cash requirements. If only he could have just let go of the money bags to rise to the surface where he would have gotten a breath of fresh air and fresh perspective. But he didn't, the fat lardy music industry refused to recognize the new internet horizon and fought pointless legal battles and still, to this day, takes sweet old grannies to jail for sharing a couple thousand songs with their bridge group.

I'm not saying file sharing is OK or even that granny shouldn't go to jail if she steals music, but what are you going to spend your time doing?

It's like the drug war. People are going to do what they're going to do. You can spend your time putting people in jail, or come up with a system that is more beneficial and less harmful for society as a whole.

So as the movie industry protected it's system, and improved on it, the actors and their perceived "fame" were protected. Not so in music. File-sharing became a reality and artists who were looking forward to retiring on their recorded catalogue saw album sales fall off completely.

When Phish or Sting Cheese Incident or Blink 182 or Sublime or Styx or any other group that has announced retirement (or should have) need money, know what they do? Pile into the bus and sell some concert tickets baby!

I don't know about you, but Blink 182 seemed a lot more "famous" when they dominated the radio waves in my teenage years, versus now when the same, exact, song, is still being played on the radio. Phish was a lot more magical when they didn't need to take a hiatus to cure a lead guitar player's drug problem, only to return touring as what many have dubbed Phish Lite.

I think a lot of the destruction of fame and mystique came with the rise of the internet in different ways, too. As soon as you know every detail about an artist, available at any time of day, unmitigated by Rolling Stone but exposed for all to see on Wikipedia, where is the mystique? A blogger named Bob Lefsetz put it eloquently when he wrote: "You used to have to go to the show".

It's probably for the better. Fame is destructive and ultimately annoying because we as humans weren't programmed to be exposed to millions, it's not in our nature. Being an artist today is about sustainability, finding a way to produce and sustain off something that is not easily marketable or even describable. Fame is not the reward. Making art a career is about finding a balance between entrepreneurship and worldly knowledge, capitalism and community-building. That is your reward.

a note from the plane

Wanted to post this morning, sitting on the tarmac at DIA. Frogs played the last two nights in Vail and scurried home to Denver for an hour, just long enough to shower and head to the airport. Life is crazy right now, to say the least. After playing the Maple Leaf tomorrow night, we'll cruise around New Orleans, enjoying a much needed psuedo-vacation. Returning from NOLA on Fat Tuesday will hardly be the end of what we are calling "Marchdi Gras". Our amazing, multi-purpose road homie, Double A, will pick us up where he dropped us off just days before, for the trip back to the valley for CarniVail, playing to a blocked off street of 500 people or so. The next day I turn 25 and we open for the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Later in the month we team up with heavy-hittin' Ivan Neville and his Dumpstaphunk. I'm blessed to have so many friends and fans across the country and I cannot wait for this plane to take us to New Orleans, my home away from home. Thanks to everyone who supports me in this entrepreneurial, oftentimes stressful and hectic, job. Happy Mardi Gras!

*forgive all spelling and grammar errors as this was composed via blackberry on flight 1222, with a southwest stewardess breathing down my neck...

Mousike Magazine Article

the following appears in the current issue of MOUSIKE MAGAZINE:

by Trevor Jones

Here at Mousike, we recommend you consume as much music as possible, every day.

So how do you get your recommended daily dose of music? It’s a question most of us rarely ask ourselves, in large part because it has become so easy. When the internet arrived on the scene the web virtually destroyed the “normal” means by which we consumed our daily music. Radio and the record labels who provided individual songs to your locally owned radio stations collapsed and a new model, full of free music and online resources for listening has swallowed us, listeners and audience alike, so much so that it’s hard to decipher exactly what happened sometimes.

Thirty years ago all you had to do was call in to the local DJ, request that Blue Oyster Cult cut you’ve been craving and he was happy to help you out. Have you tried calling Clear Channel recently? The receptionist who answers probably can’t name the station in the city you’re inquiring about, because he is sitting in a corporate office building, far from any microphones or radio antennas.

So what happened? And more importantly, what do bands do these days to make sure people hear their music, in hopes that they themselves become that daily dose of music you crave?

This is where I should expose my bias. I’m a musician myself and just like everybody, I care about the welfare of the people in my industry, specifically other musicians. During the rest of this article it might feel like I’m trying to convince you to care, too and I am. For good reason. We live in a free market society and so if we want quality art, we want artists to get paid. Not just musicians either. Comedians, painters, poets, people who craft miniature portraits out of sand in tiny glass bottles, all of these people need to be paid if we want their art, whatever it is, to stick around. Take the Writer’s Strike of ‘07-’08. Sitcoms and late-night shows alike were scared to death because their writers would not return work until they had been paid for internet downloads and smart phone streaming.

So as I climb down from my soapbox, let’s figure out exactly how we get our music these days and how some local bands distribute their tunes to the masses.

First, the early days. Remember ‘em? You got your music just like you bought everything else: you up off your couch and walked down to the store. This was a very deliberate, physical process, just as there was a physical hole in your wallet where $15 used to be before you bought that new CD.

I also remember when Napster happened. I was 13 years old and in the prime CD-buying phase of my life. Even after most locally-owned record shops closed, I still had to get a ride from mom down to the aptly named “Warehouse Music” to spend $15-$20 on Hootie and the Blowfish, Lenny Kravitz or maybe even some ZZ Top or Led Zeppelin. As soon as I downloaded “Boyz in the Hood” on Napster, it changed everything. Nothing was unsearchable or unaccessible. I chuckled ten years later when my dad joined the revolution and showed me all the albums he had downloaded with BitTorrent, a modern version of Napster. This new way of obtaining music was decidedly non-physical and non-monetary, perfect during breaks at work or on a boring Sunday. I’m glad he got that King Crimson back after I lost his CD case in Europe all those years ago.

This new way of getting our music, requiring little more than a point and click of the mouse, was here to stay. Artists didn’t like this, or so it seemed. The spectacle of litigation brought about by Lars Ulrich made it seem as if every artist was, point blank, against file sharing. Unbeknownst to the media and maybe even Lars himself at the time, was the fact that file-sharing was the best thing that could have happened for artists and their creativity in an industry controlled by big record labels who had little interest in the music itself, only the bottom line. Later on, Lars would regret his attack on Napster.

“We didn't know enough about the kind of grassroots thing, and what had been going on the last couple of months in the country as this whole new phenomenon was going on.”

-Lars Ulrich

Napster brought about what would be ten years of tumultuous, confusing dealings in the music industry. People found new ways of file-sharing and the record industry would sue individuals here or there, ducking their heads from the media when a curious eleven-year-old or some sweet little granny would be sued for thousands because of copyright infringement. Apple’s iTunes and iPod first edged out music software programs, then buried all other devices period. How many Dell or Microsoft music players do you see anymore?

Meanwhile, the internet itself developed myriad sites and plans for music delivery. Pandora, Grooveshark and Spotify are all examples of streaming music services that are free but give different listening options, payment plans for premium service and even differ in the legalese they use as protection against litigation.

But perhaps the most perplexing, the most paradoxical method by which we receive our music, is on YouTube. What kind of world do we live in where people get their movies from iTunes and their music on YouTube? It’s bananas. But it’s true. And why shouldn’t it be? Music on YouTube is like watching an alien-MTV on steroids, impressive looking and filled with content for the future. For bands, however, this illogical but very popular medium provides a great way to promote the music in a visual way. I recently saw a video of a band shooting a flame-thrower and fire extinguisher at one another. I don’t care what you’re promoting... that’s awesome.

YouTube panders to our primary perception, vision. We all know how much better a concert can be with just a few lights, lasers and a smoke machine to occupy our visual field. Also, musicians tend to be pretty hairy/ugly, so a bright flashing distraction never hurts. But the need for visual stimulation in our modern age is a big one. A great music video can break a band instantly, much like a radio single could several decades ago.

I was at the grocery store in Avon and someone asked me recently if I thought Jimi Hendrix would become famous if he were playing today. I said no and my new friend shook his head and agreed with me. Back then it wouldn’t have had much to do with social networking or YouTube, only word of mouth about a new fiery guitar player. Jimi would come to rely on people like his manager and ultimately his record label to be heard. So what does a burgeoning Jimi or Bob or Janis or Jim, do today?

They adapt to the new system. Bands in Colorado have been doing it for several years now. The majority of any band’s revenue comes from playing live shows, so that aspect of the model hasn’t changed much. What has changed is musician’s attitudes about how, and how much, to sell music for. The cost of making an album has come down exponentially in recent years and so bands are no longer beholden to big record companies, oftentimes they only have themselves or one or two investors to pay back. With this financial freedom comes executive freedom as well and artists are increasingly intelligent about managing their creative assets and royalties. When most of the music out there is free, due to file-sharing and sites like Pandora, it becomes very hard to compete economically when a group’s music costs anything at all to download.

I went online to research some Colorado bands and found a varying array of distribution strategies. Yonder Mountain String Band offers free downloads, but only a smattering of their overall catalogue, in hopes of snaring fans into buying whole albums. The Motet offers their last album, completely free, while putting their more recent effort up for sale. Big Gigantic doesn’t beat around the bush, a quick Google search renders direct links to multiple pages of free music downloads. In a smart move, their last album can be downloaded for money, but fans get a bonus track.

Big Gigantic has faith in what they are doing and it shows. They know their music is so good, people will pay for the whole album just to get that last bonus track. Of course some people won’t, but for those people their is a “donate” button. When Radiohead released In Rainbows for free a couple years back, they made more money off donations than from actual sales of all their other albums, combined. When people get their daily dose of music, they are truly grateful.

As a consumer, we don’t really think about all of this. Music is so easy to obtain these days, and we no longer have to rely on a terrestrial radio system with no character and little quality music. Record labels, payola, and all the corruption that ruined creativity in those systems is gone. The landscape is more barren now, the musical fruit more accessible to the consumer. This new landscape is certainly more harsh and entrepreneurial for artists. Then again, isn’t that what makes a great artist? Although it’s cliche, great art comes from struggle. Not only do we expect that from our artists, we want to support them through their struggles. If only all of our endeavors had a “donate” button.

Anyone who is, or has been an entrepreneur knows how tough it is. The prospect of giving away your product for free seems not only illogical, but akin to business suicide. That gives you a sense of how upside down the world of media has become because of the internet. Newspapers, books, movies, TV shows and even this magazine you hold in your hand... none are immune. In a sense, we have come full circle.

During the Renaissance, music was very much a free market commodity. People hired musicians because they thought the tunes were off-the-hook, and to listen. The idea of every piece of music (pretend CD’s existed) being the same price would have been ludicrous. Some music sucks, some touches the voice of God. Is every painting a standard price? Now we have returned to employing the proverbial “donate” button. The real struggle for musicians is making their “donate” button more valuable than the next. From this struggle comes great artists and most importantly for us as listeners, great music.

Tour Time and Time Warner

This week, the Frogs are headed to Texas. Things have stabilized in the FGF camp since moving into a new house and getting robbed several months back. The Denver police found one item (the largest and most expensive) and Steve and I were more than happy to sit at the cop-shop, haggard and anxious for hours, in order to tow our PA back to it's rightful pad. We have an awesome new roommate moving in, Calvin, who works in finance and can probably provide some perspective to us about what life in the corporate world might be like. The first time he came over we bonded over his "existential breakdown" in NYC, where I had just returned from a wild trip, running back and forth between Brooklyn and Manhattan, recording two full songs and playing two shows. Producer Will (Will E. Beats) and Engineer Klem should be sending me some tracks this week and I will post the new tunes as soon as they are in my eager paws, or Frog toes to be more specific.

On that note, the amount of Frog memorabilia we've obtained over time, a relatively short time, is astounding. From where I sit at my computer in our living room I can see:

- A giant stuffed Frog from one of our youngest fans, a kick-ass little girl name Willa

- Posters from over a dozen shows, We've only begun to put them up. our buddy Kevin in the mountains has stacks and stacks in the archive.

- A wall-sized, sewn blanket of our South Park-style caricatures, replete with our Frogs Gone Fishin' logo. If Trey and Matt came in the door we might have a lawsuit on our hands.*

Any number of amphibian-related books, holiday-cards, painted Mexican leaping Frogs and hygiene accouterments like candles or soap decorate our house, bathrooms, Suburban (Leslie) and RV (Bertha). I am a Frog. It's not a question if I want to present myself that way. People refer to the group as "The Frogs", individuals as "a Frog", and make checks out to us as simply "Frogs".

These are physical indications of the world that your band becomes. It is much more than a physical world, however. Your world as a musician is defined by concentric circles around which are your band and it's family. Family goes way beyond the conventional definition at this point. And just like you love your real family, as it's the only one you've got, you love your fan base and business associates, even the annoying step-brothers or creepy uncles in the bunch. From the moment you wake up to when you go to sleep, you take stock of this family, figure out how to make it work together for a greater experience than any fan or band could achieve by themselves. Most often this happens in the form of live concerts and your job as musician is to make fans feel like you are watching them, as much as they are watching you.

It's so cliche to discuss, but that reciprocality between band and fan is the ONLY thing keeping you as musician from disintegrating into some sort of repetitive, guitar-playing robot. And when fans come to multiple shows in a row, your art becomes more comprehensive because you have the arch of time to work with, days in between shows, as a new factor to manipulate. Active fans will guess rabidly about which songs will be played in what order, which songs will open and close the next show. Some bands have whole archives, dedicated to information about those very statistics.

That is the source from which your world as a band should emanate, the catalogue of songs you maintain to play at the moment that is just right for band energy and audience atmosphere. In fact, that is where you can draw the line between real musical artists, and corporately created pop-stars. Real artists operate on a catalogue built-up over time, pop-stars are ushered into the public domain on a cascade of dollars, not musical aptitude or hard work. It's also pretty cliche for artists like me to bitch about said pop-stars but none of it is relevant anymore, anyway. Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift sell a fraction of the CD's Britney or N'Sync did, the model has gone out the window.

What we are left with are hard working bands (we're now on hour seven of the 15-hours to Texas, in the middle of Kansas, as I finish this post) and independent-minded labels who might get their cash from the big boys, but certainly make their own decisions, sometimes for the worse. One of the more famous examples of this twisted carnival-industry came when alt-rock band Wilco was released by their label, only to be picked up by another owned by the same parent company, Time Warner. Not only had Time Warner financed Wilco's record, they had to essentially buy it back from themselves when the band was let go due to poor management.

Many years ago... OK maybe 6 or so, when I was (hopefully) less wise to the ways of this world, I thought being signed to a major label would be the best, the balls, the brass ring and not knowing what that would mean (large-scale debt to a corporation) I was probably disappointed when my amateurish emails to Sony or Disney Records or who knows where weren't returned promising studio time and world tour. Now, after seeing what happens to bands who are signed to contracts they can't fulfill, oftentimes because a major won't market them correctly, I realize that there's nothing better in the world than being able to call my producer Brad, or lawyer Eric with a problem and have an advocate on the other line, rather than some money hungry scum-bag whose utterly disinterested in music or art.

After returning from TX, Frogs will spend some quality family time for Thanksgiving at home and tour around Colorado during the winter. NYE will take place in Telluride for two nights straight of celebration with the FGF band. Everyone who attends will receive a live CD of the show. Also, check out a pair of new music videos, produced by L.A.-based filmmaker Travis Milloy:

"Never or Now" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYB1thJbVHA

"Herb" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8y0clvIako&feature=related

Enjoy!

*Trey Parker and Matt Stone must have some ballsy lawyers. The creators of South Park are also from Colorado... must be something in the water.

NYC - Fall Update

I'm cruising out to NYC on the 18th of this month record some new music with producer Will Boyle in Brooklyn and a good friend from college, Jason, who works way too hard and plays too well to be out of the industry itself. I also had lunch with DJ Logic and his girlfriend Diane, a friend from Vail, so maybe we can convince to come over from his joint in Brooklyn to do a track.. wink, wink, nudge, nudge...

Side projects are really important. While I'm in Brooklyn, holed up in a warehouse studio, Mark and Steve (drums/bass in Frogs) will be touring the West Coast with their side project Oak Creek, making it as far as LA. Beyond being a sort of blow-off valve for creative energy, side projects are expanding our horizons coast-to-coast, something that will inevitably benefit Frogs Gone Fishin' down the road.

The Indian summer in Colorado this year kept the leaves on the Aspen trees yellow for a longer period than normal. Driving around the state playing shows from Ft. Collins to Telluride has been memorable all summer long, and we've had some out-of-control shows involving lake houses, crazy club owners, hippies and their dogs and lots of dancing people.

Along with the heavy energy that autumn always brings, bands start planning some important shows in their yearly cycle. This time around we'll bring a Wizard of Oz theme to our three Halloween shows in Boulder, Denver, and the Vail Valley. I suppose I won't say exactly who I'm going to be, but I need a blue dress, soon...

It's been almost six month since Actual Natural was released on our dedicated independent label, Mountain Size Records. We have a great relationship with our larger family in MSR and we face lots of challenges together. Today's music market in a word, sucks. CD's used to sell hundreds of thousands of physical copies. Because of music piracy and also some pretty greedy lending practices on the behalf of labels, the industry fell apart in the 2000's. Combined with a larger economic collapse, not too many people are shelling out $10 for a whole album anymore. Labels are forced to rely on creative marketing methods and persistence, where they used to be rely on throwing lots of cash at the problem. I'm still of the opinion that a little cash can go a long way, not in terms of ad space, but creative ideas that engage the consumer. I've tried to get our label to see this and I hope they understand but given their busy lives and day jobs, I have a strong feeling the entrepreneurial burden will consistently fall with the band. In fact I don't think that will ever change and I don't think it's a bad thing.

In that respect, we gotta keep it movin'. We gotta raise the roof, kick the tires and light the fires. We have to be social net-workers, performers, salesmen and somehow maintain some sanity and a friend or two. And forget dating. Or a part-time job. If it doesn't have to do with music, chances are your boss will see the disconnect in a hot, quick minute and quietly ask you to resign. This means you better be booking your side project, duo and solo gigs months in advance and then spend all day on the computer and phone promoting them. A big budget would help, but virtually no one has that these days, save for the one or two major promotion players (Live Nation and AEG). It's time to buckle down and focus.

Dorothy and touring musicians both know there's no place like home. Back in August I enjoyed a sublet, courtesy of the gracious Tim Dixon and his two distinguished brothers. I was in my bed at home a total of three nights out of 31 days that month. Thanks guys, I hope I didn't overstay my welcome.

Now that Frog's have moved into our house north of Denver, life is settling down a bit. It's good to finally get to know the town I grew up in. My experience in live clubs and bars didn't really begin until I grew up musically in that wonderful, energetic town of New Orleans and so seeing Denver for what it is in terms of the live music scene is eye-opening. I'm going to start blogging about the scene here in Denver, my travels to NYC, and a topic I can't help but write about, politics. Things have gotten so weird in that last realm, I'll reserve future posts for the topic.

The dudes up at Mountain Size Records are running a promotion on Actual Natural right now. Check out the store and type in FGF1OFF to get a discount on the disc. Go getcha some!

TOUR PHOTOS

Pics from last couple years of tour...

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

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...

Rolling Stone Cover

Last week, I wrote about the state of the music industry. After writing the post, I saw a magazine cover which crystallized things for me.

Nothing needs to be said about Rolling Stone and their immense influence on young music lovers. We can discover much about the music industry, just by looking at the cover of last week's issue.

First, notice that only 50% of the feature articles listed on the cover are about music.

Taylor Swift was to be expected, she's had the top selling album on the pop charts (which is selling dismally by record industry standards).

The other two bands are Rolling Stone cover standards, however. Green Day and U2 have been on the cover, in photos and print, ad nauseum for as long as I can remember. They also represent a dying breed of artists who can tour heavily and still play their own instruments and write their own songs. Seeing them together with no other musical mention besides Taylor Swift on the cover of Rolling Stone is an indication of the smaller and smaller range of traditionally "marketable" acts the record industry is producting.

The text and articles on the cover of RS can be interpreted and analyzed, but it is the picture of Taylor Swift and her guitar which jumps out the most. The guitar is beautiful but is missing a key musical element, a string. The contrast between the perfectly dolled-up Swift, and her guitar, is striking.

I'm well aware this is probably not even Swift's guitar. Maybe it is and she missed the implication of being the world's most famous new musician with an unplayable guitar.

The point is that Rolling Stone and their team have effectively demonstrated the dynamics of an industry, more focused on style than substance, in one photograph.

NOLA Press, New Projects

World-class drummer and music editor for NewOrleans.com, Kevin O'Day, graced us with his presence in our living room the other day to talk about our move to NOLA and future plans. Check out the awesome article here.

Otherwise, I've started a side-project called the TJ Gospel Project to play some gospel, blues and soul tunes. The band will include my pedal-steel playing friend Ed Williams, gospel drummer Mike Davis, and Frogs bassist Steve Rogers. Our debut gig will be APRIL 16th at Carrollton Station in New Orleans so please come out and support this new, soulful project!

Frogs Gone Fishin' is busier than I can describe with language right now, but please check for our New Orleans, Tennessee and late-nite JAZZFEST (!) dates.

Here's a picture of me having a blast, or trying to catch a raindrop in my mouth, while sitting in with Papa Grows Funk the other night:

Pirates

Not of the Somali variety.

No, these pirates headquarter out of their basements and bedrooms, planning and hording with hard drives and bitTorrents. They are musical pirates and they have been running amok, plaguing the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) since the Captain himself, Shawn Fanning, launched Napster in 1999.

This week it was announced that several nations, including China and Iran, will bypass any potential legal options and attack the pirates at their source, off the coast of Somalia. It was also announced that the RIAA will take a similar approach to combating online music piracy. Lawyers for the group said that rather than taking offenders to court, they will work directly with internet access providers to shut off access to websites that direct traffic to places where illegally pirated music is available. These websites are not yet illegal because they only direct traffic, not host any content themselves.

Pretty tricky, these pirates.

I'm not really sure how the international community will fair against the Somalian marauders, but I think what the RIAA is doing is a fair step against only the largest perpetrators of online music piracy. I'm sure if the RIAA had means of prosecuting each and every pirate perp out there, they would. But the problem is simply too massive. After all, online content is some of the only free content (or free anything) people get these days.

That is where I would draw the line and help the pirates out. Not because I think people should get free stuff, but because the MAJORITY of musicians out there benefit greatly from the uninhibited file-sharing of their music. Remember that in most genres, musicians make vastly more money off of touring revenues than recording revenues. The Frogs pay rent and buy groceries every month by playing two to four shows a week, every week. (I'm staying in CO while my family travels to TX for Christmas because have a show on the 26th and flying back the day after x-mas is a movie I've seen too many times...)

By comparison I would estimate we sell 10-20 CD's a week, revenue which is still flowing directly to our independent record label, Oh/Ya Records, in the form of recoupable funds.

Another form of band revenue is merchandise. Our shirts are really cool looking and once we have the design ready for some FGF action figures, we can expand the product line.

I truly hope that pirates, musical and maritime, will have some heart this time of year and stop capturing massive amounts of illegal music and large groups of sailors, respectively.


Everyone here at Frogs Gone Fishin', Trevor Jones Music, Oh/Ya Records and For/Sure Productions, hopes everyone out there in the blogosphere and real world have a safe and happy holiday season.

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....