So much of life amounts to ditch-digging, doesn’t it? Even when you have this crystal-clear vision of what you want to do. The plan always looks lovely when you write down the high-level goals, like, say, finishing a marathon; it’s only when it turns out that the plan bottoms out to, oh, waking up at 5 AM and running 10 miles in the rain, that you start to think through gritted eyebrows, “This had better damn well pay off somehow.” But of such tiny actions, larger accomplishments are made. And so it is with my music.
What do I want? I want people to hear my music. What specific advantages do I have over the normal, talented musical person? Well, I don’t need to make any money at it. Ergo, I should find venues where people are going to hear me by accident – which means beyond open mikes, because we all know each other already, and beyond opening slots for better-known performers, because no one’s really listening to the opening act. And I should make my music a bargain – cheap (e.g., $5 CDs) or free (e.g., give it away on the Internet). There’s the plan. And a fine plan it is. Shame it consists mostly of ditch-digging.
Things like driving down to Fall River to buy a miniature PA for rooms which don’t have a sound system. Didn’t have one of those. Now I do. Things like tracking down every single venue that anyone you know is playing at, and charming the booking person (not my strong suit). Things like ripping CDs to MP3s and making them easy to listen to and to download, like Jonathan Coulton (check him out at http://jonathancoulton.com; he’s the bee’s knees). Things like getting my music on iTunes. Reprinting my latest CD so that it has a bar code (oops, forgot that the first time). Setting up a (barf) MySpace page, even if all it does it point to my actual Web site. Getting my songs on Internet radio (remember, I don’t care if I get paid).
Man, that’s a lot of ditch-digging. And I used to look at it and find it overwhelming, and I used to avoid some of it pretty religiously. And one of my disadvantages is that I don’t have the time to dedicate to this that full-time musicians do. So very little of it has gotten done.
But life is short, and you only get one, and over the last year or so I’ve gotten fed up with my distaste for all these things. And I’ve been inspired, lately, by Stuart Ferguson (http://stuartferguson.net), who’s doing lots of this stuff, and finding the time for it even with his day job. He recently wrote to me: “I spent so much time waiting to do things that I wasted a lot of time.” Amen. So I’m promising you that by this time next year, I’m going to have made a serious dent in all of it. I’ll be playing twice as often as I am now, with half of the gigs long-format foot-traffic situations; I’ll have an iTunes presence, and a MySpace presence, and I’ll be on Internet radio.
And then we’ll see how I feel about ditch-digging.