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| One-Man Top 40 July 25th, 2006 -- Top 40 radio. Bah! Well, not really. I like a lot of that stuff, in one way or another. On any given song, if the music's no good, the lyrics might be clever. If the lyrics aren't clever, it might be well sung. If the singing's no good, maybe the video's entertaining. If the video falls flat, and there's nothing entertaining going on with any aspect of the whole ordeal, then you'll just have to wait until the Usher song is over.  Many people, though, scratch their heads when they listen to top 40 and say "who listens to this crap?" What's worse is when you think that this is the best that the music world has to offer. Wait. No it's not. Right? Well, it depends. You have to ask yourself, what makes music good? If your standard for what makes something good is what people like in the aggregate, then yes, this is the best music we have, and that's a bad standard. But I would suggest that if your standard is what you as an individual like, then your music is going to be just as crappy as top 40 music, and that it's also an equally bad standard. In other words, if you buy an album or request a song simply because you like it, you and people like you are the reason top 40 is bad. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, since we're about to head into the studio. I'd be lying if I said I wanted to make something that was objectively good but hated by everyone. I don't. I'd also be lying if I said I wanted something that would be a huge hit but forgotten in a week. I guess I want us to do something in-between, something that appeals to modern sensibilities and tastes but which also happens to be good music. When I mixed a demo recently, one of the band members told me I shouldn't be too critical of certain aspects because I shouldn't "think like a musician." Well, I am a musician, so that's how I'm going to think. If I'm a bad musician, I'll make a record that's esoteric and unappealing to everyone except me. If I'm a man-pleasing fashionista, I'll make a forgettable record which will sell millions. If I'm a good musician, I'll make good music. Simple as that. Keith |
| Here's My Plan July 20th, 2006 -- I'm thinking about changing my look. Imagine a two-inch thick line going from the top and middle of my forehead, extending backwards all the way down to the base of my neck. I'm going to shave off all of my hair except for that one bit, then I'm going to spike that remnant of hair straight out. It'll look kind of like this (which is called a "fauxhawk"), but you have to imagine the other parts shaved:  I'm going to call it the Fauxfauxhawk. I've just finished up my mud-slinging contest with the "kinists" yesterday. One of them proved that he was willing to lie and start a rumor about my teaching career, one that would be stuck on Google for the rest of my life. I said "that's some nasty mud, you win." Thankfully, he took his rumor down after I asked him, but, believe it or not, I didn't think they would go that far, and I was surprised when they did. Pretty irrational of me, to think that people who were willing to say black slavery in America was an ideal situation and that blacks are in general just functionally retarded wouldn't be willing to lie about some guy they've never met. Oh well, lesson learned. One of the funniest things is that of the five of them I got to know, none were from anything other than the very far fringes of the South, or in two cases, from completely outside the South. One of them lives in Orlando, one in Ohio, one in Arkansas, about a 1/2 hour from the Missourri border, one in Illinois, and one in Texas. I've tracked the people who came from their sites, and the same thing is true for their readers. Maybe one out of twenty are from a real Southern state, which I fairly narrowly define as Virginia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. The rest of you, states like Kentucky, Florida, Oklahoma, etc., I'm sorry. The guy from Ohio, inexplicably, has public web stats, so you can see a map of his visitors. Sometimes there are a good many real southerners, but often there's this ring around the old South. I noticed when I lived in Indiana that there was a greater preponderance of rebel flags on trucks, houses, and heads than there was here in South Carolina. South Carolina, in my mind, is the most rebellious state, the one which fired the first shots of the Civil War, the state which seceded first. However, you'd be surprised by how few rebel flags you see on a day-to-day basis. I can only think of two houses that fly the rebel flag, and if you see someone wearing a rebel-flag hat, it's often a teenage boy or a very grizzly-looking late middle-aged guy. So, has South Carolina given up on the South? Probably. Here in Greenville, our economy relies largely on non-southern (and non-American) companies, companies like Michelin and BMW. They've allowed our city to raise itself from being a failed textile mill town to being a very upper-scale engineer and executive town. In the small-town backwoods of Arkansas, there's probably less of a reliance upon Northern and European imported wealth, so it's easy to say "screw them northerners, we don't need 'em!" But I think another reason has to be that we live every day with the effects of our forefather's evil ways. Some of them have been positive, like how the music I play wouldn't be possible without the amazing cultural infusion of Africa. Others have been negative, like how many of our cultural landmarks don't exist anymore. I almost can't stand how beautiful Savannah is, but it makes it worse to think what Atlanta or Columbia might look like if it hadn't been for the extreme stubbornness and short-sightedness of people in the South (and the North) 150 years ago. I heard someone say once that "in the South, history is not in the past." We know the effects and the damage revolution causes, and we don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past. Anywho, things are going well. I'm finishing up the electrical work in my kitchen, we just got a fantastic AC unit from Cliff (THANK YOU CLIFF!) which I jerry-rigged yesterday. Okay, I have to take a picture of this. Be back in a second. Here it is:  I used some scrap wood I took out of the kitchen to make the tripod stand, and the plug was broken so I hard-wired it and hooked it up to the circuit breaker box. Ghetto hardcore. Talk to y'all later. Keith |
| The Minor Life July 12th, 2006 -- I was talking to a friend of mine a few weeks ago, and he made the comment that he felt like his career had plateaued, so he was considering a career change. I thought about this, and after reflection, I simply can't wait for my career to plateau. First, let me say -- I have very few ambitions in life. I want to be a good husband and dad, and I want to put food on my family, er, table. I'd also like to have a career I don't hate. This last one is probably the exception, compared to most people. Most people's reason for having a career is to make money, the more the better, and if they find themselves at the top of the ladder with nowhere else to go, they assume they've picked the wrong ladder to climb and they try to switch ladders. Me, I think you should pick the ladder you like best (within reason, no folk dancing or aroma therapy), then you live at or below the income you can bring in. Don't go the other way around, where you choose your career by seeing which ladder you think you can climb the highest. I can't count the number of people I know who hate their jobs, who only do it because they can make a little extra money. Whenever I get ambitious, it tends to make everything worse, and it makes me start worrying about things I can't change. I got off the phone tonight with a guy who's going to try to hook us up with studio time, and he said we probably won't be able to record until September. At first I got anxious, because I've been wanting us to get out and play some shows, and this EP was going to be a big part of that. However, with us not going into the studio until September, that means we won't be able to finish mixing and mastering until probably mid-October. But, if we went into the studio today, we could be done by late August. In reality, though, six or eight weeks difference is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. We can use this extra time to work up a couple of new songs, and get better at the ones we have down, and who knows, we could just have that much better of a recording. So, the point is that most of us are not going to be rich or famous, or loved and adored by all, and that those who do have often gotten to where they are by trading the simple pleasures of the minor life for the minor pleasures of the major life. I recently watched the psychological drama/romantic comedy Some Kind of Monster, and there's one scene where Jason Newsted, who was Metallica's bassist for fifteen years, says that he's never had children and has never gotten "distracted" by starting a family because "music is my child". Watching him doing commercials for Rock Star: Supernova, with Tommy "I brought my reality tv crew with me" Lee and Gilby "the Yoko Ono of Guns 'n' Roses" Clarke, I couldn't help but think "sorry about your kid, Jason." As for me, the reason I can't wait for my career to plateau is that my schedule will be full, I'll have all the work I can do, and I'll be making all the money I can make, so at that point I'll be done climbing, and I can just enjoy the view from my moderate plateau. Keith |
| False Non-Starts July 5th, 2006 -- I keep telling people that this page isn't a blog, but a page for our band, and that if there's no news then I might post about something else. However, since there hasn't been any news for a while, this page is becoming less band-centric and more Keith-centric. Hopefully this will change soon, and I can regale you with innumerable stories of Wind-Ups glory. I'm trying to figure out exactly how that can happen, and no luck yet, but maybe it will come soon. My history as a musician has largely been that I practice on my own, I partake in someone else's music-making organization, and they tell me when I need to show up, and when I do there are hundreds of people there ready to listen to me and the other musicians, and when I'm done I get paid. But that doesn't really work when you're the founding member and chief organizer and promoter of a group. I keep saying to the other guys that if we can just get out there we'll do well. I've seen the other bands that do well around here, and while they're very okay, I know that we're better. Or, I should say, we have the potential to be better than they are. So, baby steps. Recording, promotion, playing, Bentleys. In that order. Keith |
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