Category: Music

In July, I played a duo show with one of my Lost Cartographers collaborators (singer Gabrielle Schafer) at the venerable Chicago club Schuba’s. The show went really well, but our melancholy, often-dark alt.country was perhaps not the best complement to the earnest pop of singer-songwriter Katie Todd, the headliner for the night. After the show, one of Katie’s fans was chatting with Gabrielle and asked something along the lines of, “What’s up with that guy and all the depressing songs he writes?” Gabrielle fumbled out something about how she thought maybe I had written most of those songs before I had gotten married, and that’s why they were so sad. “Well,” replied the stranger, “maybe he just needs to get laid.”

I smile every time I think of this story, because it holds up to the light one of the assumptions that we often make about the relationship between artists and their art, namely that art is a direct reflection of the thoughts and emotions of the person who creates it. This is particularly true in the often overly-confessional genre of singer-songwriter fare, but I’m sure the same is true in other musical genres as well as in other art forms.

The advice to “write what you know,” of course, is famously imparted to every Creative Writing 101 class, and is quickly internalized by most fledgling writers. As in most clichés, there is plenty of truth to be found in this advice — the surest way to create “authentic” art is of course to explore the characters, settings, and situations that surround you every day. There is just one glaring problem with this practice.

Writing what you know is, after awhile, deadly boring.

Yes, some of those sad songs I write *were* written from personal experience, and deeply-felt emotions. But generally, as a happily married thirty-something with a good job and a life marred by very little personal trauma, I really don’t have much to be sad about. I suppose I could write songs about the joys of a blessed life, but I suspect I would not be alone in finding such songs utterly tedious.

I’m reminded of a discussion I once saw on the Sound Opinions message boards, where someone had posted about how they found Tom Waits (incidentally, one of my favorite artists) to be annoying, because it seemed to them that people just listened to Waits so they could “feel like barflies.” My immediate reaction to this was incredulity; even if that were why people listened to Waits, why wouldn’t that be a good reason? If you only listen to music that reflects your own personal experience, you might as well sit around listening to the recorded hum of your kitchen appliances.

We consume art, I believe, to travel to places we’ve never been, experience things we’ve never seen, felt, or heard, and the best art transports us to another being, without our even noticing — and that is why I, at least, also create art. To conjure — from the flotsam and jetsam of everything I’ve ever read, everyone I’ve ever spoken with, and all the other songs I’ve heard — the mind of a character whose story is very different than mine is a fascinating and satisfying alchemical enterprise.

Certainly there are dangers to this approach; when I write a song from the perspective of, for example, a spurned woman or the engineer of a doomed train, I do not know what it is actually like to be a woman or a train engineer, and I risk misrepresenting those experiences. But good art, I think, can — and should — accept those challenges. If Homer or Shakespeare or Bob Dylan had only written about what they knew, would anybody care about the work they produced? I certainly wouldn’t put my three-chord ditties on par with the masters, but hell — I’m the one who has to live with them for the rest of my life, so they better at least be interesting to me.

P.S. If you’re interested, Gabrielle and I will be back at Schubas on December 12 (tickets on sale now!), opening for Jill Andrews.

A couple of weeks ago, I observed with interest a discussion on Twitter between the Lost Cartographers‘ bass player, Karl Seigfried, and writer/bass player Keidra Chaney. The discussion was too long and wide-ranging to reproduce completely here, but it centered on the question of how the rise of internet is affecting both journalists and musicians.

Karl, who makes his living performing and teaching music, pointed out the dilemma facing recording musicians in the age of the “information wants to be free” generation.

My students are performance, music business, and music ed majors. All want music for free, but still think they’ll make a living at it.

And later:

This is what I mean about the internet model not working. These young people will NEVER pay for music. So how do we finance recording?

Now, I’m generally a proponent of the idea that having their music downloaded for free (whether legally or not) is not necessarily a bad thing for bands, and that fighting the technology, as the record companies have attempted, is an unwinnable battle. But it does raise the question, as Karl asks, of how musicians without the backing of a record company afford to record and effectively distribute albums (or singles, or ringtones, or whatever the dominant popular musical form becomes).

Despite the steep drop in costs for recording technology in the digital age, recording can still be one of the more expensive endeavors musicians may undertake. Equipment, including instruments, microphones, and software, must be rented or purchased. Experts in engineering, mixing, and mastering may need to be hired. Some physical copies will likely need to be manufactured. Those who have day jobs may need to take time of off work to attend to the recording process. If no one buys the music we record, how on earth do we justify this expense, and afford to make future recordings?

It’s important to remember, I think, that while the death of the record industry model as we knew it is certainly a paradigm shift, musicians were making a living long before the first record company was formed — performance has always been, and will likely always remain, most musicians’ bread and butter. The sort of large-scale effort represented today largely by complex recording projects was in the past by supported primarily through the patronage model. Wealthy individuals, families, or organizations (such as the Catholic Church) would provide the funds to support artists for the length of, say the composition of a symphony, trading actual capital for the social (or spiritual) capital of having their names associated with great works of art.

The move to the record industry model was a result of the fact that, by virtue of being recorded onto a physical product — a record, cassette, or CD — music became a commodity that could be exchanged not just for social capital but for actual capital. Record companies controlled the means of production of these commodities, from the recording studios to the vinyl pressers, and therefore were able to institute what was in effect an artificial scarcity; as a result, the demand for their products was usually higher than the supply, resulting in massive profits for the companies that controlled those means of production. Today, when the means of production are effectively in the hands of nearly everyone who owns a computer, the cost of reproducing that product is virtually zero, and the supply of recorded music far outstrips the demand, recorded music is largely a valueless commodity.

But while the monetary value of recorded music approaches zero, the emotional value for music fans remains high – we all remember where we were when we first heard our favorite artist, or how a particular album got us through a difficult breakup, or whatever. Clearly music fans want musicians to continue making music. As a result, I think we are going to see a return to the patronage model of artistic production, with one incredibly important change: patronage is now longer the province of wealthy families and the Church, but of many ordinary individuals. And I’m not talking about the “pay what you like” model that superstar bands like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have experimented with, in which they use their own vast wealth to finance recordings and then make them available to the public for whatever price the public feels they are worth. I’m talking about artists like Jill Sobule. After years of touring (and yes, one minor hit in the 90s), Sobule had built up a small but dedicated fan base. When she found herself without a record contract, she was able to get those fans to finance her next album through pre-orders and giveaways — to the tune of $88,969 — from just 638 fans. One fan, who pledged $10,000, was even invited to sing on the album.

And now, websites like Kickstarter and Pledgemusic make this model available to all artists. A Brooklyn-based band called The Damnwells is, I think, the perfect example of this new model. Virtually unknown, they self-financed the recording of their album “One Last Century” and gave it away for free, even paying for ads announcing the giveaway on the website and email newsletters of Paste Magazine. As a result, they gained a great many fans who might never have heard of them otherwise, and were able to leverage this expanded fanbase into $30,000 dollars worth of pledges for financing their next album (while simultaneously supporting the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Malaria, and TB).

One can imagine that this individual patronage model could be used to finance other aspects of an artist’s career, in addition to recording. Donate X amount, and you’ll get put on the guest list at the show of your choice; for Y amount we’ll schedule a stop in your town; for Z amount we’ll do a private show in your living room.

If we are lucky, the death of the record industry will mean the end of a middle man between musicians and their fans, and the success of a band will hinge not upon slick PR campaigns and payola to radio stations, but on the direct connection between fans and the music they love. Of course, corporate sponsorship will never go away, but I think the fan patronage model makes the playing field infinitely more level.

Last week was the second annual Record Store Day, the admirable goal of which is to get people to support their local record store. This past weekend, Sound Opinions devoted their show to interviews with some of the heavy hitters of independent music stores, including Chicago’s Reckless Records, the Bay Areas’s Amoeba Music, and Austin’s Waterloo Records. They also spent a great deal of time rhapsodizing over the nostalgic wonders of the record store that can not possibly be replicated by digital downloading.

I have to admit, it’s been a while since I bought anything in a record store (I get most of my music these days from eMusic). But I find it slightly bizarre that Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis spend much of their time applauding the changes in the music business that are leading to the collapse of the major labels’ outmoded business model, then spend an entire show lamenting the challenges wrought by those changes on the record stores’ outmoded business model.

The problem for record stores, I should note, is not that the internet has enabled people to illegally download music that they otherwise have bought in hard copy — studies indicate that those who download music illegally actually buy more music — but simply that no brick and mortar store can possibly offer the range of choices one finds on the web. If I want an album by a relatively obscure band like the Pine Hill Haints, I could get on the CTA, go to Reckless Records and try to find it… or I could get on the web and order a copy in the time it would take me to find my keys.

These days, services like iTunes make it almost effortless for independent bands to get their music online, while sites like CDBaby make it possible to get hard copies in the hands of individual consumers without the hassle of finding a distributor to get their music into record stores. The record store as middleman no longer has much reason to exist, unless it can find some way of adding value to the experience of shopping there (and I don’t consider being smirked at by a 25-year-old who thinks he’s the second coming of Lou Reed but still lives with his parents to be value added). Unfortunately, the future of the record store may very well be that rack by the cash register at Starbucks.

Now, don’t get me wrong — I have fond memories of teenage years spent browsing record stores and blowing my meager summer paychecks (I’m looking at you, Rhino Records in New Paltz), and I still enjoy having a physical copy of a cd, with album art and liner notes and so on. I would love for the Lost Cartographers‘ music to be able to help support independent record stores, but our label doesn’t have a distribution deal, and our fans will only be able to get our music online. And until someone starts a CDBaby-like business aimed at distributing physical product into physical stores (rather than just to individual consumers), record stores simply won’t be able to compete with the abundance of music available online.