Do I feel like a bit of an oddball when the online world is obsessed with video and being over the top, while I specialize in relaxed interviews and text? Yes. Yes, I do. What is amazing is that I have found clients that seem to appreciate this. What is even more amazing is that those clients are musicians who put on energetic concerts. But maybe you don't want a big-personality performer managing things behind the scenes. Maybe you want the introverted geek who has a penchant for reading liner notes.
Sandy Gennaro (Cyndi Lauper / Joan Jett): I remind corporations what's really important. Sometimes people in a corporate world focus too much on the numbers, on the result of somebody's work at their company. "What have you produced for me? What have you done for me and my company?" And they're judged based on just those numbers… spreadsheets, quarterly quotas, pie graphs. "How much is your vacation going to be? How much is going to be my bonus?" These are all thoughts about numbers.
And I call this “paying attention to just the icing and not the cake.” The cake in this case is the people behind the numbers. Focus on the person in addition to the numbers that they produce. CEOs need to be reminded, because their head sometimes is totally involved with the numbers and the profitability and the shareholders. "Are the shareholders going to be happy?" But what about the people that provide the numbers for your company, that provide the product or service that your shareholders love? You know what I mean? It's about that. Don't lose sight of the human being that produces your numbers. Clients Cowboy Mouth combine a live performance of "Jingle Bells" with winter fail videos. Got my copy of the new 10-inch EP of "Rockin' Legacy, Vol 1" by clients Professor Louie & The Crowmatix, featuring their covers of "Atlantic City," "Another World," "Like A Rolling Stone," and "I've Been Workin'."
Daniel Glass: The record is called “BAM!” My nickname in Royal Crown Revue was Bam Bam. And it’s a sort of, bam! Here it is! We’re coming out swinging and just really going for it.
Cris Cohen: But also, there is a sense of fun to it. It’s attention-grabbing, but also says “we don’t take ourselves too seriously.” Daniel Glass: My philosophy is that I consider myself to be an entertainer, in addition to being a (hopefully) well-accomplished musician. And the reason I chose that cover and went in that direction… I wanted to do something fun. Something playful. Something that reflects the joy in the music. We have a go-for-it attitude when we play. We're not afraid to really mix up the material. We're not trying to be anything but ourselves. I wanted the group to have a very strong identity in what we do, which is really hard to describe. It’s very eclectic. It's based on what we love, and us trying to be in the moment and play music that we enjoy. And hopefully, you'll come along for the ride. Just as the quality of a song cannot be measured by its chart position, awards, or sales, the quality of your content cannot be measured by social media stats.
Cris Cohen: This might seem a little bit of a stretch, but I would even draw a through line thematically from that experience to the recording of “Crash of the Crown”. In the sense of… you guys were moving along with it, the pandemic hits, suddenly everyone is in their own homes, in different countries. And yet, you guys found a way to record together virtually, and get around this obstacle. Like, “Okay, we can't push through this thing, but how can we get this done in other ways?”
Lawrence Gowan of Styx: So that was the challenge for everyone, everyone on planet Earth. How do we navigate our way through this, with a virus that doesn't care what our intentions are? And the disappointing thing for us, I have to say, was that we had made “The Mission” entirely with all of us in the studio together and had that experience like a band would in the 1970s, a band like Styx, where we're in each other's faces, and our phones are all shut off for five seconds, and we can actually embrace that method of the analog world of how to make music as a band and have it sound like it came from that era. So we figured all that out, and we had to replicate that on the making of “Crash of the Crown”. We had the songs written, all but two of them, and had started the recording process that way, or at least myself and Tommy Shaw and Will Evankovich, who was our co-writer and producer on both of those records. And suddenly this interruption happens. And like everyone else, we thought, “Well, it's a drag. We'll have to stop for maybe as much as six weeks, maybe even two months, before we can get back to it.” And at the two-month mark, we thought, oh, once again, not following our script. This could be indefinite. We went back and we listened to the songs. And we felt, “These songs relate so well to what we -- and probably a lot of people on the planet -- are going through psychologically and the challenges that we're facing. The lyrics really fit with this situation. We have to find a way to do this.” For myself living in Toronto, I couldn't cross the border anyway. So that was a moot point. So we realized, just like you and I are doing this Zoom thing… I didn't know what this was in February of 2020. At the end of March 2020, I was very familiar with it, and this became a new phenomenal tool for communication. You and I are speaking, we could have this conversation over the phone, but there's something about being able to look you in the eye and see you and get some kind of idea of obviously this guy’s into the Stones, and stuff like that. Like knowing these things, it alters the conversation. Well, I have a great studio in Toronto, with all this analog gear I bought years ago. And I have a great partner there, Russ Mackey, who's a phenomenal engineer and producer. And Tommy and Will were in Nashville, Todd was in Austin, Texas, JY in Chicago, Ricky was also in Austin. We all figured out how we're going to do this. We used this Zoom medium and a thing called Audiomovers. We pushed through and made the record starting from around late August of 2020 right into about November. In October, I was done with all of my parts. It got so second nature that it really felt exactly as if we were in the studio together. And that I think speaks volumes to the adaptability and flexibility of human beings when faced with a challenge like that. We still were able to do the record, to tape and to get all the analog juice in there that needed to be there in order to make it qualify or in some way resonate as a classic rock album. And again, the resilience of Styx. This speaks probably to why this band has endured for half a century. It's 50 years old. And that's just another aspect of how they've navigated it. How should you handle the changes happening to the social media platforms? I recommend apathy. Seriously.
For one thing, the feeling is mutual. These companies do not care about you. In fact, they work very hard to prove they do not care about you. As proof, I direct you to… well, almost any news story about them in the last decade. Secondly, if one social site flames out, another one will come along. You can also go retro with websites and newsletters. Some say that means missing out on the attention economy. But really, the attention economy is dominated by people pushing out hate speech, sleazy sales pitches, and borderline pornography. Sometimes all in the same post. Instead, make something good, something you would like watch or read. There are people who want to see that material too. Good tends to not go viral. Good rarely makes the news. The social media algorithms actively work against good. But somehow good endures. And good is more likely to connect with people who will support your music, your business… you. I interviewed John Brodeur of Bird Streets. We discussed:
Bird Streets website: https://www.birdstreetsmusic.com/ |
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