LNOYL

If you are stewing in conflict, then know that good things can come from it if it bubbles over at the top in just a certain way. We’ve had to deal with a few growing pains and misunderstandings over the past weeks in order to get back on the same page. Because we are inexperienced, but overtly willing to do things on our own terms, we’ve had to establish some new roles that we are to play, if we are to meet the expectations we have set for ourselves. Dareck’s been working twenty four seven on the set of some national geographic show, and Kirk’s been mixing pretty non-stop. I’ve been writing this new manuscript that has no working title as yet. Maybe as I start posting segments of it, like the one below, some of you will come up with a suitable title. Anyways, the motivation for creating this manuscript was born out of an argument, and I describe it like this:

…When we finished our last winter gig, things definitely felt a little directionless. I suppose we never really clicked with the drummer we had just recruited a few months earlier (we actually never heard from him again after that last gig; I’m sure it was a mutual parting of ways), and our bass player, who was a really good guy, was heading out west – permanently as it turned out. Dareck wasn’t too happy with his performance that night, and he was reaching for ideas, left, right and centre to address what was making him uncomfortable about the situation. He was pretty anxious about it as well, and we ended up having a big argument over what to do, and where to go with things. To make things worse, I reacted badly to some of his suggestions, and Dareck subsequently got even more frustrated and pissed off. None of his ideas made sense to me, and I failed to respond properly, in part because I didn’t have the background knowledge to fully articulate my gut instincts about the situation. I was frustrated and pissed off because we had finally launched this band off the ground, and instead of recognizing what we had achieved so far, and using that as motivation to get the the next spot, we were instantly immerse into shit storm of confusing, anxiety based assertions of what we needed to do next. When we ran out of things to say to each other, Dareck went upstairs, and I just sat at the kitchen table. I could see that our progress was going to quickly grind to a halt, because of these pseudo-issues born from our ignorance.

That argument with Dareck turned out to be pretty important. There is nothing worse than that feeling – when things begin to go nowhere, just when you think they are going somewhere. We needed an antidote. We retreated to our parts of the city, and I ended up reading a few posts from Bob Lefsetz’s blog. Mr. Lefsetz is a music industry critic, and he was pretty much my first exposure to the ideas that explained the changes taking place in the music industry. I really didn’t know jack shit about the organization of this industry, and the current issues within it, until I started reading some of this guys rants. In a few of his posts, he mentioned Seth Godin a few times (I forget exactly what the context was – but there was something intriguing about this guys approach I thought). I downloaded an audio book – Seth Godin’s “purple cow”. When listening to that book, I found that if you substituted the word “artist” for “product”, and “audience” for “consumers”, all of a sudden, there was this whole way of spinning all of our current frustrations and ignorance into a tangible perspective. This was a concept and world that I had never been exposed to before, but it instantly made a lot of sense for a number of reasons. When I got to a point where I was relatively comfortable with all the ideas, I created something along the lines of what your holding now. I called up Kirk and Dareck, and told them that we had a plan, we had a direction…

continued next week…