Tuesday, January 4, 2022

Music Appreciation postpartum

 Blogging is my day job. Making, producing and promoting music, namely Christian music, is what I do to dust off the dreams of my failed teenage attempts at being a rock star. But as a wise friend of mine once said: "Yes, there are a lot of musicians and talent out there but there's no reason you can't be part of it all."

God Plays Montana album cover


So after fooling around with guitar and limited poetry performances for many years, I finally buckled down during the pandemic 'rockdown' and started producing demo tracks and releasing them prematurely via DISTROKID without really knowing what I was doing. But the creative impulse once let loose is hard to stuff back into the bottle. So my first two solo albums, God Plays Montana and Naked Flame, didn't make a dent in the universe as was to be expected. So I turned to what I knew about the creative arts and Internet marketing from author blogging days a few years back and shifted gears into music marketing full speed ahead. Two month laters, over 10,000 site visits and a bonafide collaboration EP with other musicians that I produced executively (and which is getting FM radio air play in European stations now), I've learned a few things in music appreciation post production.

Naked Flame EP cover

1. The music scene ain't hardly what it used to be like back in the day. It's a quantum infinite universe accessible to anyone anywhere now and that has its advantages and disadvantages. Easy accessibility often means a lot of garbage gets into the mix so I had to retrain my ear for quality and originality.

2. Music, for the most part, has been 'de-mystified' and is not the pseudo-religion it used to be for us long hairs. People can take it or leave it now pretty much and it's just a lot more background white noise in an Atmos Dolby verse--an Internet with no intermission.

3. There are so many genres and sub genres that when a person claims to be a Christian musician, I have to ask (besides the obvious moral implications of avoiding vulgar lyrics) what he or she means by that? Christian rocker? Hip hopper? Rapper? Hymnal or acoustic? Or in my band, Patient Chill's case--Nu pop. It's all good and I've featured all genres on this blog and will continue to do so but sometimes folks seem hard pressed to classify themselves.

Patient Chill EP cover

4. Production matters and promotion does even more but very few independent artists will focus on the latter, hoping against hope that a record label will suddenly swoop down from heaven and lift them up into the spotlight. So many are just satisfied with turning the church into a stage and claiming humility as an excuse and perhaps rightly so in a lot of cases. But if you are sharing your music on the Internet, what are you really thinking?  Is it a ministry or is it a show? Maybe neither, maybe both? Do you even know? Whatever motivations, speculations, appreciations you harbor, never forget that all this is passing and God's love is better than life.



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