Magical Leaves Red White Black Heat
“What do you do?” I sit and think about it for a moment, I don’t know if I should be honest of my doings and don’t’s but I will probably just conform to the general concept of “what one does” in meaning what one may do to create income for their living expenses and beyond, and thus I respond with a simple answer. “Music, I sing for people, and do recordings for myself and others.”
It seems to catch some off guard, the fact that I find some sibilance of success in the pursuit of what some may call a “fun job”. But I say, FUN JOB, my bum. I haven’t too much longer before I must return back to the preschool that my daughter is at to retrieve her and finish making her snow globe, and so I want to be brief (I think).
In 2007 I traded my pursuit to become a nurse for my desire to sing for people, to “change the world”, to travel and see, feel, hear, experience. I made records, I spent my life savings (monies) on making said records, in 2009-2012 it seemed as though this was all a possible way to continue. To continue making music, touring, singing, and producing bands records on the side. Sometime between 2012 and 2019 there came a shift, one that now, I can hardly put my finger on. I suppose it was a culmination of so many things.
My generation was CD driven when it came to music. In early 2000s iTunes started to dominate the market.
After 2012 (or whatever the year was) digital streaming QUICKLY took over the vast majority of how people consumed music.
Where once Emma and I were selling dozens of albums, both CD and VINYL per week on the online store, we are now selling 1, and maybe not even that. Streaming had taken the vast majority of not only royalties from musicians/artists proverbial pockets, but it was destroying other mediums through which artists are able to make money, enough to feed themselves/their families, but ALSO make the records that people that listen to their music want them to. Strange concept really.
I have always heavily believed in PHYSICAL MEDIA, at least how I consumed it. The large artwork with credits of who played, who produced, where it was recorded, who wrote the songs and the like, all these things got me so excited when purchasing an album. I don’t expect or even want everyone’s experience with music to be the same as mine, that would just be silly.
What does a singer do? Where have all the cowboys gone? And survival of the fittest is a proper insert here (I do believe).
The last record I pressed (to vinyl) was Discovering Responsibility Through Fatherhood
Which is an album that I wrote/recorded with a good friend, good man, good Father, Nate Pyfer. We had decided to do this album for our babies, before they grow and leave. The record is about becoming Fathers, finding responsibility through life and particularly parenthood.
WITHOUT going into EXACT numeros, we would need to have the record (in its entirety) streamed MILLIONS of times just to make back the monies that went into the making of it.
Where does that leave an eater artist?
I AM NOT CLAIMING impossibility.
I AM CLAIMING probability.
What is the likelihood of taking risk with a very improbable outcome of positive compensation? AT that point you are spinning financial wheels. I love riding bikes, I would ride bikes all day, but I don’t expect it to pay me money, and that is fine, music doesn’t need to pay me money, that was never the point, but real records were able to be made because of the fact that IT WAS making money and so that was reinvested back into the engine. Supply only comes from demand, I think?
I am NOT complaining, and I hope it isn’t received that way.
I have been lucky as a survivor from Noah’s flood in my life.
PERFECT it has been.
It is a mere observation and place in life in which I need to step back and look at it from afar.
Death is inevitable in all things.
I have HEAVILY diverted my direction with what I was trying to or at least going to say this morning. It is the theme that I WANTED to talk about that lead me to the one I DID talk about. SO, to quickly insert.
I made a small record of songs.
I am releasing it Christmas Eve day.
It is called:
MAGICAL LEAVES RED WHITE BLACK HEAT
Thematically chameleonic.
Covers of CHANGE/Christmas/Country/Death in LOVE.
As much as I would love to have the record pressed, it wouldn’t be prudent.
AND SO, I am doing a small run of hand printed CD’s only.
I am carving a linoleum stamp to hand press each CD cover.
There are still some that do like to have physical media, and I do understand the disdain for it as well, what a dichotomy, really.
FOR THOSE that do want one of these Hand Printed Cd’s there is a pre-order here.
FOR ANY AND ALL who have helped ANY ARTIST (no just me) by going to a show, buying a T-shirt, a record, a button THANK YOU. It means much more than WE say. Gratitude is heavy in me.
It will also be on DIGITIZATION sites.
GO FIGUH.
Joshua
