Welcome! Here you can read all about my songwriting quest. It follows my adventures in making and finding music that builds community and defies traditional music industry tenets. You can expect to find videos, photos, and musings about music that makes me smile, as well as insight about ways that musicians are skipping the middle men and singing right to the fans. Thanks for coming!

7.08.2010

Ani DiFranco at Ex'pressions College

A couple weeks ago--thanks to truly amazing friends and my quick typing fingers--I was the first to respond to an email saying there was an extra ticket to see Ani play at Ex'pression College in Emeryville. It was a pretty sweet setup. They get these great artists to come in and perform to give students the opportunity to film a live show. So my friend Ellen and I got to stand ten feet away from Ani as she belted out some new stuff.

Here's the link to the show. (The stream still isn't showing the entire show which is very annoying, but it's a good taste.)

The really interesting thing about Ani is how raw she is and always has been, about her politics and her relationships.  And it seems like now--she's with the man of her life and has a 3-year-old baby--her gritty relationship song days are over, but her political songs are back with the same poetry and intensity that sometimes gives me goosebumps.

I have to admit that being in a less angst-filled relationship has resulted in me listening to her less. But hearing her now was like seeing an old friend who has gotten her life together in a really positive way.

Oh, Ani DiFranco, how you've carried me through many rough patches.  Thanks for helping me never feel ashamed calling myself a feminist.

6.10.2010

Not Music News...

So unrelated to anything music, GOOGLE found my blog!! Yea! I finally stop watching and look what happens!  Those little spiders hadn't seen anything I wrote since this blog was still various shades of ugly purple!  How embarrassing:

But now when I click on my Page Rank I can see the last time Google put my blog into their Rolodex of sites to tell people about when they search:
Does this matter?  In the grand scheme of things, probably not.  I'm sipping dubiously on the Kool Aid.  All of these tools that give you "insight" into how many people look at stuff and where exactly they're from is feels great.  But unless you're selling something specific and going to use the information to change the content of your site, it's really nothing more than a time suck... But suck away, because it's captivating!!

5.28.2010

Another cover: Gillian Welch "Look at Miss Ohio"

So here's what happens when you don't spend the extra 4ish hours to awkwardly sync up video from a Flip to the audio of a Zoom:



For this one I hooked my Zoom H4n up to the laptop and used the internal camera on the laptop.  Dang. I've been under the impression that you can have crappier video if you still have great audio--and I think there's a lot of truth to that--but I think this shows it's nicer to have both! 

Maybe I'll try again.

5.21.2010

The Bazaar Cafe

I just had a lovely night at The Bazaar Cafe way the hell out there on California at 22nd.  I've been hearing about this place for a long time now.  It's kind of a songwriter's hub/haven in SF.  It seems to have a pretty similar crowd to the Hotel Utah folks, but without amps and mics.  You come to Bazaar to listen.  I was messing around with an iPhone for a few minutes before I felt unbelievably rude.  Not that anyone made me feel that way, the place just commands that kind of presence.  Okay, I'm digressing.  The point is the cute little community these guys seem to have. Super talented and it seems like they hang out... (I promise not to be creepy.)  Here's a picture of the cafe.  So cute!



Actually, I noticed this little group the first time I was at Hotel Utah.  I had been to a few terrible open mics* in SF and then stumbled upon this little place where everyone was really talented.  Even the songs that I didn't like that much were really well done.  And right in the middle of me thinking "Man, these guys are great.  If only they were friends too..."  Some guy gets up and sings one of the host's songs!  He covered a friend's song!  Check, check, and check.  It does exist! Yea!

So here I go... Me. Next Thursday. Bazaar Cafe. 7:30. 

*At Amnesia once--and don't get me wrong, I adore that place!--right after I sang there was a man who came up and made the audience shout out Beatles songs for him to whistle.  He could whistle really well, but he had no idea how any of the songs went.

5.20.2010

The Japanese Storyteller Returns!

Yea!  Hurray!  So I was mistaken the first time around.  This is not really a music thing.  BUT it's still awesome.  Kei Sakaguchi (the storyteller) teaches kindergarten in Japan and reads all over the place, in Japanese and in English.  So in the US he's been going around doing guerrilla readings.  He even went into various bookstores and asked to read.  Super cute.  And I gotta say, getting people to smile while they're on their way to MUNI is no small feat.  Well done!!



He also read a great Japanese story about farting, but I think that deserves its own separate video.

5.12.2010

Cover: "Bien o Mal" by Julieta Venegas



Things I learned from making this 2 minute cover:
  1. Putting a video camera on a box doesn't mean you will automatically get your full head in the frame.  (This might have been a happy accident!)
  2. Trying to sync video from a Flip and audio from a ZoomH4 leads to approximately 4 extra hours of work.  However, it's not impossible.
  3. But it is impossible to do a silly cover video and not feel 12 years old.
  4. Despite the time it takes and the assured ridicule, it's fun to make silly videos.
  5. A fake drum solo will drown out most swearing.

5.11.2010

Video Songs!

Ooooh!  I get it!! I wrote early about Pomplamoose and how they started this thing they called Video Songs. (A funny side note is that when you type "video song" into google, you get a link or so of Pomplamoose and then a ton of links to Bollywood songs.  I have this awesome image of the two being related.  But alas...)

Anyway, on their myspace page they've got a ton of subscribers, BUT only 3 subscriptions.  (I hope you're sensing the mysterious tone in my voice.)  Hmm.  Interesting.  So tons of people want see you, but you only care to see 3 people.  What could that possibly mean??  You guessed it!  VideoSongers! They are in the process of starting a movement.  A movement of 3!  Hear what you see and see what you hear in a video.  It's a good way to counteract the glossy, video-madness of today.  I like seeing (and showing!) what's under the hood. 

Get your head out of the gutter.

And stop clicking on my hyperlinks and navigating away from my page!

...I really need to figure out how to have them open in a new window.  Ideas??

5.08.2010

Love this picture...

Julieta Venegas at The Fox in Oakland.  5/5/10

Julieta Venegas

Te Quiero, Julieta!

I need to say something unabashedly:

I LOVE JULIETA VENEGAS!

Truly.  She's a wonderfully talented singer/songwriter/musician from Tijuana who creates these songs that are fun and beautiful, and make you feel as though life is slightly less complicated than it sometimes seems: the good is never perfect and the bad is never insurmountable. Obviously, she sings in Spanish.  I understand about 3/4 of what she says, but I'm pretty sure I get the gist.  It's liberating stuff.

I saw her play this past Wednesday at the Fox in Oakland--hence the remembering that I love her--and she was just as amazing as ever. She's preggers this time around.  Adorable.  Anyway, it hit me while I was there that part of the reason I love her so much is the community she inspires around her music.  Her lyrics are really powerful to the hardcore fans, and they (we!) show it.  Throughout the entire show the crowd is smiling, saying excuse me when bumping into people; people are singing along and looking around to find new friends who are also singing their hearts out.  Pretty cute.  One amazing woman engendering so many smiles and so much good will.  Love it.

IMG_2616

And then I realized something bigger.  Look at this picture.  Do you see that?  Julieta is at the piano and there are 8(!) people on stage with her.  8!  That's kind of a lot for the music she makes.  She's got 4 women, and 4 men up there.  Gender balance, what?!?  Awesome. She's made a community of musicians who have worked with her for years and everyone shines in their own way.  It's beautiful.  All my other musical loves have great concerts, but there's just a touch of loneliness.  Regina Spektor's concert--also at The Fox a few months back--was like that.  She played with people for a few of her new songs, but you got the feeling that they were hired guns, there to fill up the space.  Then she did the rest of the show by herself on that massive stage.  Big ups, but a little sad.  Maybe Regina likes it like that, but I would want to do it the Venegas way: the more the merrier.

I think I'm going to start here with some covers.  Julieta's songs are so fun and I love trying to sing in Spanish.  Viva para-social relationships!

4.30.2010

The Japanese Storyteller

These guys were adorable.  I think I just found the fun I was looking for...

4.29.2010

Where is the fun music community??

Help!  I'm stuck!  The whole point of this blog is to find cool people who are doing chill things with their music on the internets.  I'm finding more and more company-based stuff--Topspin Media allowing you to market and sell music directly to fans; this new company Root Music that makes free and awesome skins for Facebook fan pages (you can pay a little to make it even cooler)-- BUT WHERE IS THE MUSIC?  All this stuff is for the business of music.  That's important.  But where is the fun?  Where are people making music that's fun and inclusive and doesn't take itself so seriously??

I went to this party a couple months back.  They called it a "Talent-Is-Overrated Art Party."  Everyone came and just chilled and painted or drew or did something else creative.  Fun, communal, nonjudgemental.  That's what I want to find for music. It's not that I don't think that my music is good enough, I just get a lot more from the community than from hustling.  I might get the hustle bug someday, but for now I just want this to be fun.  Please comment if you have any ideas.  In what corners of the internet are these fun communities??

Hmmm... or how to make one?... hmm

4.28.2010

YouTube's Musicians Wanted

YouTube was at the Grammy event hyping their new YouTube: Musicians Wanted program.  Sort of interesting.  What is it?  Well, YouTube is trying to help musicians making money from people watching their videos.  Step 1: Upload a ton of videos.  Step 2: Get a lot of people to love them and watch them.  Step 3: Apply to be a Musicians Wanted participant.  

It kind of helps you take your videos and fans to the next level.  Once you're in the program you can make your channel look cool, and they will help to surround your content with ads from companies that might relate.  Then you get money.  You even get your own pop-up ads on all your videos! (God, I hate those things.  Soooo annoying and NO ONE reads them!)  So yeah, that's new with YT.  There's a good chance I'm over simplifying it.  Not really helpful for me, but probably helpful for other people.  Those with real videos and gigs and stuff.

The Revolution is Here...Probably.

Do you ever feel like you're standing in the middle of a meeting where the cotton gin has just been shown for the first time?  Or maybe that's just how big corporations make you feel whenever they reveal something new.  So I started this post last Friday when I got home from Grammy Soundtables: deals dollars and law.  It was this event where different industry people came to talk about just that.  What are deals looking like these days? How do you make money at it?  And I guess there was something legal about it, but it was integrated enough into the other discussions that I missed it completely.  YouTube, Topspin, Rock Band, and DIY artist Zoe Keating.  More to come...

4.21.2010

From Baby Band to... Toyota??

What???? I think I might have been on the early side of "breaking news."  Yeah, that's definitely in quotes for a reason.  So a few posts back I wrote about this Bay Area band Pomplamoose and how they do all this cool acoustic stuff and I got sucked into their genius indie music trap through their internet tracker beams.  Well, today I'm watching Hulu and in between HPV commercials I hear their cover of "Mr. Sandman" on a Toyota commercial!  Seriously??  So I google this to find that my ears did not fail me.  Here's a write up about about it in the Examiner.  Dang.  Very jealous, and very impressed.  I've written half a song in the last three months, inspired by ridiculous "scandal" of the latest Bachelor finale. I see you judging... but it's going to be awesome :-)

4.17.2010

This is HARD!!

Ugh.  It's hard to learn the internets!  This whole week I've been trying to throw myself into everything web-related to try to figure out what I should be worrying about, and what I should ignore.

Analytics and Whatnot 
Google analytics is a tracker thing that you can add to your page.  It basically shows you how many people are looking at your pages, the average time spent on different pages, and how they found your site.  Kind of creepy-cool.  Maybe that's helpful.  I put it on a few sites so we'll see.  It makes my inner voyeur very happy.  This is the site to find it http://www.google.com/analytics/

But there's soooo much more.  I'm trying to figure out what search engine optimization (SEO) is compared to search engine marketing (SEM). Who needs it and why?  I'll write more about that once it makes sense to me!

iDUH
I even went to a one-hour presentation at Apple yesterday to take an iWeb tutorial class.  It was pretty informative, if only that it gave me a good visual of the things I probably could have easily figured out myself.  You know what amazes me about Apple?  The crazy divide they create by making their stuff so easy and accessible.  I mean, I have to know very, very little to be able to create a website on iWeb and then publish it using their MobileMe thing.  I don't even have to know that code exists!  Awesome, but scary.  I want to know enough that I'm not completely lost when things inevitably aren't working right. But thank you, Apple, for making it easy because I doubt I'll ever be a code wizard--even though the hat and cape would be sooooo cool!!  

4.13.2010

Adventures in YouTube - Pomplamoose

Bands on YouTube.  A few days ago I went in search of what baby bands are doing on YouTube.  There's this model people talk about where you do what bands in bars have always done, start with covers.  You make some videos of you covering songs, post them as responses to other videos that people are watching, and get people to look at your stuff after luring them in with the carrot of something familiar.  That's when they start looking around at your page, and start saying "Hey, they've got their own music?  I wonder what it sounds like?"  I felt pretty genius for knowing this.  And then within ten minutes felt like an idiot for falling for my own secret trick!

Pomplamoose.  It means grapefruit in French.  Ugh.... (and so awesome!)

They do these "videosongs"where they have these super low budget, but really well done videos of the two band members--a couple (GAG... and adorable!!)-- singing and playing their stuff.  They did this indie cover of "Telephone," and they did it really well.  So I was like, "Hey, that's really cool.  I wonder what other stuff they have."  TONS of covers.  And a lot of really good ones.

And then I noticed there was a note to check out their own music on a myspace page.  So I was like, "Hey, that's cool, they've got their own music.  I wonder what it sounds like?"

DOH!

They got me.  Good work, internet.

4.11.2010

Music on the Street

Okay, so this isn't exactly a post about ways of getting your music out there, but it is a post about people doing fun things with music.  Specially, playing music on the street.  For me, street music is really powerful.  I'm out somewhere, minding my own business when all of a sudden I'm tractor beamed into a group of other strangers to watch music.

LURED IN BY STITCHCRAFT

This happened to me a few today as I was leaving the Green Festival.  I walk out the door, a little sad about walking away without a good supply of fair trade chocolate when I'm zapped by the beam of a group of 3 musicians powered by two kids on bikes.  That probably makes no sense.  Let me try to explain that again. There was a singer/guitarist in a cute green dress accompanied by two percussion guys (one playing the telephone pole with a what looked to be a wire hanger).  The amps/mics/speakers were powered by two girls biking to the rhythm.  Awesome.  Band name is Stitchcraft and they do this Rock the Bike thing with a bunch of other musicians.  I tried to walk away and get on home, but I couldn't.  The pull was too strong.  So I took out a video camera and took this video... My favorite moment is the comic relief at the end when the old man charges the camera.  Good times with strangers.

DIRTY BLUEGRASS (THE BEST KIND) AND GOSPEL
A few months back this happened to me with a band called Fruition.  I was walking down Haight and did the same thing.  Disturbed traffic a little bit crossing the street.  They were awesome.  And then a couple weeks ago when I was walking home from class I walked passed the SFSU Gospel Choir singing in the crosswalk near campus.  I think they were just waiting for cars to pass, but once they realized they had attracted a little audience they kept on singing.  So I grabbed this.

SO LONELY
I tried this a couple of times, singing in random places.  I brought a guitar to a farmers market and a few people sat down and ate lunch nearby.  I've played some music at various MUNI stations a couple of times.  Always a healthy mix of awkward and kind of fun.

So actually, I completely take back what I wrote in the first sentence.  This is absolutely a post about getting music out there.  Maybe not for record deals, but for sharing.  In three separate instances, I've come home being a fan of someone I would never have heard of.  So maybe next time I'll try to make it more legit.  Maybe make a sign so people can look stuff up later.  Maybe think up a good gimmick to make it exciting for those who aren't into music.  Maybe I'll wear my "I Love Muni" t-shirt.  That'll get people riled.

4.09.2010

What's this all about??

So... I'm trying to do something in a way that's kind of the opposite of how you're supposed to do it.

I've got some music.  I like to write songs.  And some people like them.  I like them too, but kind of in the way that I'm wary of turning them into polished pieces.  Everything I've done that gets a polishing seems to sound terrible.  So I'm happy enough with my low-fi's for now.  My favorite ones are the ones I've written with my friend Sia.  He's a pretty kick-ass guitarist and comes up with crazy compositions, and then I write songs on top.  I love our stuff but we're cheap and in different cities, so us relying on crappy mics and email is what we're doing right now.  For a while now I've been slowly, slowly chipping away at this music stuff, and am relatively content with it being a hobby.

HOWEVER, the problem is that every time I go see shows where fabulous women are up on a stage singing and laughing, I get sooo inspired and soooooo jealous (Julieta Venegas, Gillian Welch, Regina Spektor-- I'm talking to YOU!)  So yeah, some times I want to suck it up and make a go of it.  And most of the time I just want to sing my songs and have a few people hear them and like them.

That's where this comes in...

This blog is going to document my online music homemaking.  I'll write about the cool things that I find other people doing, find some fun resources for people in my situation, play some songs for ya, and have an overall good time.  (Oh and I'll try now to get so hung up on finding cool skins for blogger and myspace!!  No promises.)

Here goes nothing...