krisis

Krisis has been creating Crushing Krisis since 2000, writing songs since 1996, and reading comics since 1991. He is a Customer Success and Digital Brand Strategy executive, serial organizer, parent, and feminist, among other things. Based in Philly through 2017, he now resides in Wellington, NZ.

a little ocd is still ocd

December 1, 2008 by krisis

Chaz and I were talking about something during the drumming rehearsal – I forget what. Could have been anything, really. Maybe lead sheets.

Anyhow, the point is I said something about being organized in a typically obsessive compulsive way and he just nodded in agreement and kept talking. Because we are equally as insane as each other.

I know I don’t have an actual problem needing medication, but let me just given you two samples of my behavior:

(1) Walking with Elise this weekend she took our street all the way out to the next main North to South block. When she went to turn North, I stopped her and asked, “Where are you going?”

She replied, “To the car, which is north.” And, I said, “No, I can only walk down this street if I’m turning south.”

We proceeded to have a fight about taking the street for the purposes of turning north.

(2) Sometimes in the process of blogging I have an idea about a future post, and I jot it into a blank post as a draft so I can remember it later. However, I absolutely cannot allow posts to go up outside of their numerical order in the database, even though it has no effect on the order they are posted. It just makes my skin crawl. I have literally spent an hour pasting from one draft to another in a daisy chain to make sure I get posts to come out in the right order.

I mention this because the post that is set to post tomorrow was jotted before this post, so it will technically come out of order. It almost physically hurts to acknowledge that in writing. Of course, the number is ultimately meaningless, but once this post is posted there is no going back. Unless I post it into an entirely new post. Which I still might do.

Any time anything I do starts to feel excessive, I just remind myself, Peter, you are not compelled to vacuum your bedroom three times a day, so everything is fine. You still have not turned into your grandmother.

How you can take back the holidays while still giving gifts.

December 1, 2008 by krisis

The holiday season is upon us.

In 2005 my mother gave me a tiny rubber chicken, signifying she had donated on my behalf to Heifer International. It was my favorite gift of the year, by far.

In 2006 I bought a water pump for a remote village on the behalf of our four sets of parents, and asked others to make similar donations on my behalf.

In 2007 I gave up material gifts entirely, donating for everyone and doing my best to deflect physical gifts sent my way. It largely worked.

This year I want to redouble my anti-consumerist efforts to make more meaningful donations for more people, and to encourage them to pay it forward to more of their friends and family in the form of donations, or just more thoughtful gifts. There is still a Christmas to be had. And a Hanukkah, a Kwanzaa, and a Festivus. I’m just hoping not to cash in on the consumerism angle of any of it.

I know my approach to holidays is unusual, and I certainly wouldn’t force it on anyone else. However, given the current positive buzz of change in America, the increased interest in “green” initiatives, and the unsteady future of the economy, as my first step in “paying it forward” I’d like to encourage you to take back the holidays from the merciless grasp of consumerism in ways that don’t involve you writing embarrassing holiday limericks or making your own potpourri (unless that’s what you really want to do).

If you send holiday cards, try one or more of the following…

(1) Purchase cards or envelopes that include post-consumer recycled materials.

(2) Buy plain blank cards and personalize each one with a sketch, a note, a photo, or a shared memory.

(3) Switch from cards in envelopes to postcards, or self-mailing cards.

(4) Make a small donation to a charity on the behalf of all of your card recipients, and mention the donation in your cards.

(5) Replace your physical cards with phone calls, eCards, or messages on your favorite social networking site.

If you have people you feel compelled to buy a gift for, like members of your extended family or co-workers, try any combination of the following…

(1) Wrap less! Try wrapping your gift in household material, like newspaper or brown bags. Or, consider just putting a bow on it.

(2) Give something consumable or useful. Stay away from fancy toiletries or exotic kitchen aids – focus on the things they would really use. If you’re very close with the recipient, give them a simple physical representation of your relationship, along with a note explaining why you chose it.

(3) Make a donation to a charity local to where they live. Some apolitical, inoffensive charities include toys or coats for kids, or adoption or care for abandoned animals.

(4) Offer to help them perform a daunting task (like doing their taxes or cleaning their garage), or give them them a way to spend extra time with you during the year (like going hiking or seeing a concert).

Finally, for the people on your list who you just love giving to – like partners, parents, or siblings, try some of these ideas to take the consumer edge off of your giving:

(1) Focus on what they love to do. Why give them a decorative plate when they love to watch movies? Why give them a DVD if they are fly-fishing fanatics? Think about how they enjoy spending their time.

(2) Talk to them to see if they are saving up for something. Surprises are great, but you might find out that they’re just $50 away from buying a new briefcase, guitar, or set of golf clubs. If you help them buy that big ticket item they’ll always remember you helped!

(3) Give them the gift of a new experience they might enjoy. Send a beleaguered mom to the spa, or a shower-singing sister to voice lessons.

(4) Donate to a charity that you both share a passion for. Even better, find out if the charity invites any kind of volunteerism, and include a card with an offer to volunteer together!

And, for all of those people:

– Consider setting up a post-Christmas gift for them that will brighten their day some other time of the year. If you see a silly knickknack or a second goofy card, hold on to it to send for Spring Equinox, or for Christmas in July!

That’s the best I’ve been able to brainstorm with a few weeks of thought. Do you have any other less consumerist, more green, reasonably priced holiday solutions? Please share them in the comments – I’ll post an update within the next week with a link to your blog (or, if you prefer, the charity of your choice).

That’s (not) all, folks! (or, The Conclusion of NaBloPoMo)

November 30, 2008 by krisis

This evening marks the end of the third annual National Blog Posting Month, during which I posted a healthy 37 posts in 30 days, including 10 songs in the first 10 days in three Trios (Good Bones, Morning Light, and Instants) and a bonus tune. I also blogged on my typical wide range of topics including a celebration of our President-Elect, a two part recap of my wedding style, thoughts on Joni Mitchell’s Blue, a list of newly discovered blogs, my experience playing a terrific benefit show, and a few random inane thoughts.

As with the first NaBloPoMo in 2006, I found that a month of enforced posting transforms me into a more inspired and productive blogger, and a cheerier, more fulfilled person in general. The first time around I reinvented myself, read 2000+ blogs, and relaunched CK on WordPress. This time the effects were much subtler, but no less worthwhile.

I’m now heading into recording a new Arcati Crisis demo and playing the last few shows of our productive year, toiling through a holiday season I hardly celebrate, and enduring 47 more days of wedding preparations until the big event finally arrives. Hopefully in the course of that I’ll squeak out another Trio or two, as well as a few posts that might catch your attention.

As always, thanks for tuning in.

Why isn’t there a long tail of sheet music?

November 30, 2008 by krisis

Towards the end of last night’s fantastic drumming rehearsal in my living room we selected the cover artists for our next go, one of whom was The Strokes.

“Great,” I exclaimed,” I finally have an excuse to buy their sheet music books!”

Chaz eyed me with speculation. “Do you really need sheet music for those songs? Can’t you just figure them out?”

I plucked my Amnesiac book off of the music stand and waved it in his direction.

“Look, given enough time I can figure out anything, but then I can’t play whatever song strikes your fancy at a moment’s notice, and I won’t have something physical to put on the stand, and I can’t give you a starting note if you want to sing, and I certainly won’t know the harmony. Without this book there would have been no awesome version of ‘You and Whose Army.'”

That paragraph explains exactly why I believe all albums should have matching sheet music folios, and plainly illustrates my addiction to sheet music – because I want the ability to cover or arrange a song to be at my fingertips.

I have a sizable sheet music collection – over a hundred books. A significant portion of it is comprised of out-of-print books I hunted down two Christmases ago, including sheet music for every Madonna album and imported, out-of-print David Bowie books that contain the full scores to their corresponding albums.

Pop and rock sheet music is an interesting niche of publishing, not only because of its specialized audience of amateur and professional musicians, but because the sales of each book can be predicted by the sales of the corresponding album and the singles therein. Does every Mariah Carey album get a sheet music book? Of course – because they sell big, and the singles are huge – lots of people know the songs or want to hear them covered. Those are the books that are printed the most often. Similarly, any radio-ready rock band merits a book – like Foo Fighters, Radiohead, and even Paramore. Also, young artists with a breakthrough record often merit a first book to test the water – Anna Nalick got one on the strength of one single, and Sara Bareilles had one out when she was just touring behind “Love Song.”

The smaller or less-played the act, the less obvious the case is for a book. Get too obscureand you’re out of luck, unless you happen to be a Dresden Dolls fan – singer Amanda Palmer arranged and published two sheet music books on her own. Not coincidentally, they’re the two best-edited piano books I’ve ever purchased.

That makes me wonder – what’s the magical sales threshold that’s preventing us from seeing books from Guster or Rilo Kiley? Is it a flat number based on economies of scale in the print run … perhaps twenty or thirty thousand? Or, is it a function of album sales – a gold-shipped album might move two percent of its copies in sheet music – ten thousand units. There’s clearly a fixed, single-run print quantity for most books, because sheet music regularly falls out of print, and if the book wasn’t popular enough the first time around it never comes back.

Either way, any kind of threshold puts up a barrier between older and lesser-heard albums and the musicians that are clamoring to play them. Effectively, there can be no “long tail” of sheet music books. Yet, any DIY guitarist might argue that it’s okay, because of the internet. Why wait for a publishing company to spend production dollars arranging and laying out a book of sheet music that will cost you twenty bucks when you can crowd-source the task to guitar players in basements across American, who can tab out an entire album for free?

If the industry supported this solution I’d be all for it, but that relationship is tenuous at best. In the late 90s the Harry Fox Agency sued prominent guitar tab sites – primarily Harmony Central so they would remove all of their guitar tab archives – mostly on the argument that reprint of the lyrics without permission was illegal. It was a selfish, spiteful move on the part of the music publishing business – they shut down a venue for people around the world to play their artists’ songs, which is one of the best forms of word of mouth advertising an artist can have, yet they didn’t offer any commensurate response to the clear demand for a long tail of transcriptions.

I’ve been buying rock sheet music for the intervening decade, and I can tell you that the situation has not improved, except now Transcribed Score books are slightly more common – and they certainly represent increased value over internet tabs. Otherwise, if anything I’d say that in the 90s the threshold to print must have been lower – more niche artists got a short run of their own books. Today I don’t know that I’d be able to find my cherished book of Tracy Bonham’s The Burdens of Being Upright, or the tightly edited edition of Elastica’s self-titled disc.

The clear solution is a variation on Amanda Palmer’s Dresden Dolls model. Amanda, being just about the savviest indie artists I know of, made it a point not only to compile the best-edited sheet music possible, but to also turn her books into collectors items rife with stories and photos not available anywhere else. She sought to expand the audience for her product outside of musicians to more casual fans, which would increase her personal threshold for turning a profit on the endeavor in the long term.

It’s a valid strategy, but it’s a gamble – the extra material drives the price of the book, and relies on non-musicians fans to snap up the book for that half to help subsidize the sheet music portion. It’s probably working just fine for Amanda, because her fans are amazing, and the books were a labor of love to begin with. But, what about all of the other niche and indie artists out there who want to spread their music to the masses?

I think the best model would be for artists to offer a PDF of an album’s sheet music for download – either for free or a small fee – and to also offer a physical book containing that music plus some additional content – more detailed song histories and performance notes. Similarly, publishing companies need to find a way to do the same for out of print sheet music. In either case, if certain books prove to be big-movers on the print-on-demand front then you know to go to an actual print-run. If not, you at least have all of your sheet music compiled and available, which will draw a steady stream of revenue as a long tail shopping solution, and you can easily release a “Greatest Hits” book at any time.

Once Arcati Crisis actually records an album (hopefully next year) I’ll be undertaking that endeavor – I’ve already arranged “Standing” and “Moscow, Idaho” as a test. I’m under no illusion that we have hoards of fans waiting to play our songs, but I want to prove my point. More importantly, I want to insert my idea into the marketplace – maybe the only way I’m going to get my long tail of sheet music is to grow the damn tail myself.