Rain!
A summer thundershower! It’s been so dry that this is really really welcome.
Mailing List Comments
Thanks for your comments. I appreciate them. I realize that many of you use email as your main communication tool and will miss the newsletter. We can meet here, on this blog, from time to time. No ads, no tracking, no data collection.
Your words make me feel better about having kept up the newsletter for so long, but there are the other folks who sent me email aggressively accusing me of spamming them, of having added them to my newsletter without their consent. I have never bought email addresses for my newsletter, so the only way an address could be added to my list was if someone signed up themselves. It is possible, of course, that someone else could have signed up another person without their knowledge… but I don’t have control over that.
I just deleted my Mailchimp account. I never liked how slick the interface was and how they seemed to push towards advertising and marketing. I guess I miss the old homemade websites and interfaces from the mid-nineties – before everything became commercial and efficient and so on… I am showing my age.
As I already wrote, come visit this blog. You can bookmark it or use RSS. I’ll make it worth your time by giving away some music, too. :-)
PS: I remember sending out emails to a few fans via a creaky CompuServe account. This would have been in 1994, when the World Wide Web was still a tiny tiny baby.
Newsletter + new music
I said goodbye to the mailing list in a last newsletter this afternoon. At the bottom of the newsletter I added a link to a new song I worked on for the last couple of weeks. This is what I wrote:
Here is the new piece “Fernweh” on Dropbox: LINK
Fernweh is a German word that means the opposite of homesick… it means far-sick. Fern means far and weh means ache or woe. The compound word means longing or aching for far off places. The melody that starts about 47 seconds into the song floats above and behind the rhythm. It reminds me about Italy, but I couldn’t tell you why. I make a good cup of coffee, but there is something special about walking into an Italian coffee bar early in the morning… perhaps a place like this one, near the Pantheon in Rome.
House Events
Musicians are looking at new income streams and one of them is House Events. Check this out.
A few thoughts about Mailing Lists
Let me first thank you for the comments you left on the post Mailing Lists. They are helpful and appreciated.
I am not a star nor do I have aspirations to be a star. I view myself as a craftsman. I play guitar and I make music. I have been fortunate to do this for the last 30 years – in March of 1990 I quit my day-job in Santa Fe. Making music, in my opinion, is a lot like crafting pottery or making a sword. It takes time and an understanding of the medium. I think my albums sound better than ever. The album Fete sounds amazing. This is puzzling because my hearing is not nearly as good as it was thirty years ago. Yet it makes sense, too, because hearing is nothing without the decoding that happens in the brain. My mixes are better. The sense of space, the locations of the instruments.
I am not a good salesman. I don’t like the process. I know many people seem to think that in this new economy every musician has to devote time to developing a social media presence and amass followers. Some musicians spent hours every day doing just that. Me, I’d rather play guitar, work in the studio, or take photographs.
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about social media, and about mailing lists, and about the idea of taking an active role in promoting myself. I realize that I don’t want to… I just don’t. What my heart wants to do is to shut down the mailing list. A good craftsman doesn’t advertise… they make pottery and people come to them and buy their products. I don’t want to send monthly emails to thousands of people to advertise my work, the recordings or the tours.
If you like what I do, I hope you will return to my website, to this blog, and to the page that contains the Touring Schedule. If you are on Twitter, I will try to make announcements there. 140 characters – that much I can handle.
I don’t want to sell anything but I will continue to make stuff – music, photography, video, writing – and some of it you will be able to buy. If you want to.
