Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

my music

Lineup and links for There’s a Stage on My Lawn!

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If you are free on Saturday between 2 p.m. and 11 p.m. I hope you’ll be at There’s a Stage on My Lawn! in Yardley, PA, presented by Lyndzapalooza. And, if you can’t come I encourage you to to pass the word along to another music lover in your life.

There’s a Stage on My Lawn features fourteen amazing, independent, local artists. They’ve all been busting their asses for the past year to rock better and harder than ever before … evolving from coffee shops to open mics to underbills to featured shows.

I’m honestly a fan of our entire bill – I’m still not sure how we got so lucky as to gather them all in one place, but I promise you that the opportunity to see them all together is fleeting. And, it’s certainly not going to happen again for just $12.

I am as proud as I can possibly be to be an organizer of and an artist in this amazing event. It’s going to be good, and it’s going to be fun, and I wish every local music fan could be a part of it. Check out the music of our artists below, and then head to TicketLeap for more info & pre-sale or reserved tickets.

Geoff Ednie – Former acapella staple plays a mix of crowd-pleasing covers and originals influenced by the Beatles, Alice in Chains, and Phish.

Bevin Caulfield – Smokey-voiced darling of rooms like Tin Angel and The Fire. Lots of classic soul influences make her stand out in a crowd. (Watch)

Arcati Crisis – My band! Harmony-filled boy/girl acoustic pop from a pair of life-long best friends. Sounds like Rilo Kiley crossed with the Indigo Girls. (Listen) (Watch)

Old Man Cactus – A great band we shared the bill with at Tin Angel. Inspired by a who’s who of 70s singer-songwriters, they come off like an acoustic, bluesy version of Maroon 5. (Watch solo)

Brian Flannagan – A surprisingly gentle, folky sound from this former producer and drummer.

Lindsay Wilhelmi – LP’s founder writes unshakably catchy original tunes, and plays covers from Jewel, the Recipe, and 4 Non Blondes.

Ben Guez – Golden-throated classical singer dissects songs from unlikely sources, like classic rock, or even the Pixies, and also slips in his own infectious originals.

John Glaubitz – Original, solo modern-rock from an accomplished guitar player. A one-man Warped tour. (Listen)

Enter the Rooms – This band is hot. Incredible local alternative rockers can grab your attention acoustic or electric. A riffier Coldplay? Not sure, but they never disappoint. (Music Video)

Jesse Schurr – Tiny, local yoga instructor typically fronts an acoustic funk four-piece, but will play stripped down versions of her rhythmic tunes for us. (Watch)

Irene Molloy – Lilting, country-tinged folk-pop that would be right at home on XPN, from the star of TV sitcoms Grosse Point and Andy Richter Controls the Universe.

Da 1 – Solo MC/songwriter describes his primary influences as Jimi Hendrix and Jay-Z, and lives up the to hype with his guitar shredding and vocal hooks. (Watch)

Just Like Me – Young band from Temple plays engaging, challenging rock music. Some hear a Radiohead/Tool influence, but others cite Pink Floyd. Either way, a great band. (Listen)

Dante Bucci – Hypnotic original compositions on the hang drum, a bell-like percussion instrument. You’ve never seen anything like it! (Watch/Listen)

How To Edit Your MySpace Music Profile

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Editor’s Note: This brief article has helped thousands of musicians begin to gain control over their MySpace pages. If it also helps you please consider friending me on MySpace! In your “ADD ME” note make sure to mention that you found me through my blog. Or, comment below, including your url, to share further tips or tricks you may have uncovered.



I just spent a boggling amount of time (inclusive of intensive brain-process time while asleep) trying to learn how to update the layout of my MySpace music profile.

I won’t bore you with all the gory details. The upshot is, MySpace operates on its own peculiar set of rules, and 99% of websites proffering updated MySpace layouts (AKA “MySpace Codes”) do not care one iota if you understand them. They just want you to pick your layout and be happy.

(Even if you’re a savvy web-user it might not be immediately obvious where you paste the layout, as there is no obvious “backstage” area of MySpace. Improbably, any code alterations get pasted into your About Me box – or, if you’re a Band, your Bio box.)

My problems were twofold:
(a) We all know I can’t be happy until I understand how something works.
(b) Normal profile codes and editors don’t necessarily work they way you want them to on a Band profile.

Now, allow me to provide other musicians with the benefit of my 16 hours of experience in this field. It’s not a tutorial, so much as a guidebook. For this to be of any use you should have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS, and a high capacity for trial and error testing.



First: Understand what you’re getting into. Read an awesome article by Mike Davidson that gives a detailed overview of how MySpace layouts work, and what you have to do to alter them. They’re effectively a series of nested tables altered by simplistic CSS code – not so bad, right?

Next: See Mike’s explanation at play. Visit Views Under Construction and then visit their sample profile and band profile. Now you understand the degree of manipulation you can put your profile through!

Then: Look before you leap. Dip your toe in the alteration waters by checking out some isolated edits you can make at Pimp Web Page, pasting them into your profile to see their effects. Note that you can do more than just change colors – you can resize, move, and hide most elements of a profile.

Finally: Head to the best editor I found, Real Editor. It’s meant for normal profiles, but you can still load up your band file. Here you can tweak just about any element of your page!

My suggestion? After you’re through playing around copy out the complete code for reference. If there’s any of it that doesn’t make sense, go back and work out one element at a time. Each time you finish an element, get the HTML. It will have some other junk in it, but it should be easy to pull out the one element of the code you actually altered. After a few iterations you’ll begin to understand what’s what. Try starting with your Contact Table, which is called contactTable in CSS.

When In Doubt: It’s not always obvious what certain page elements are named, or how they’re manipulated. If you’re stumped on how to get your intended result, trying viewing the source code of your profile, or another profile that you like. Zero in on the thing you’re trying to change.

If it’s an element like your top friends, search for text inside that table – you’ll discover the table class is friendSpace. If you’re viewing a cool profile that has altered that particular element, search again – this time for the name of that class. Now you should see the CSS that’s driving their manipulation.

If what you like is a minor element, like a certain border or text treatment, try searching for that color’s hex value (grab it beforehand by taking a screenshot and using an eyedropper tool in Photoshop, or similar).

And: Every time you arrive at a non-objectionable result copy out your code into a text file and save it before you keep working. If you’re having trouble with one tricky element, just work on that element in an otherwise blank About Me box, and add it to the rest of your saved code once you get it right.

Hope this helps!



No, Not I

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On the list of Arcati Crisis’s mutually favorite artists I don’t know that there’s a musician that debuted within our lifetimes ranked higher than Tracy Bonham.

Tracy’s was the second concert Gina and I saw together; the first was Presidents of the United States of America. Gina and I were possibly the first people into the TLA that night, because I remember standing almost directly in front of Tracy, pressed up against the barricade, Gina intently watching her fingers on every song.

At the end of that school year, Gina decided to audition for the school talent show, and the song she decided to play and sing was “Sharks Can’t Sleep.”

I had just starred in my first play, but at the time I didn’t play guitar. Or sing, for that matter. Yet, when Gina told me about the talent show, I had an unexpected reaction – I asked if I could sing with her.

Our friends were immediately skeptical about this – not only did I not sing, but I was at some point banned from singing entirely in the basement hallway where we all ate our lunch. Suffice to say, I was not experiencing widespread support for my sudden impetus to vocalize.

However, I did have one supporter: Gina. Gina brought in her guitar so I could practice, and gave me my own verse to sing.

As murky as some of the details of this story are, my memory of auditioning for the talent show committee is crystalline. We were seated in the corner of the band room, Gina and I and our friends Lucy and Joanna, who were singing harmony. When we got to my verse I shook like a leaf, but ever-so-carefully sang “Met a star today…”

Afterwards someone on the committee said, “I didn’t know he could sing.”

I don’t have any memory at all of being on stage at the talent show, although there are photos to prove that it occurred. What I do remember, and will always know, is that afterwards I – completely out of the blue – demanded that my mother buy my a guitar.

I’m sure I demanded a lot of things at the time, being a stubborn only-child teenager, but for some reason this particular demand was taken seriously. Within a week I had my clunky old Ashland guitar in my hands, and a guitar lesson once a week. I kept taking them until I learned the F sharp i needed for “Sharks Can’t Sleep” and never looked back.

Over ten years later it is both completely apropos and batshit crazy that I am playing guitar in a band with Gina, since I wouldn’t be playing or singing at all without that first nod of support.

This fall Tracy blogged about “Sharks Can’t Sleep.” (She also spent some time co-writing with Garrison Starr, which blows my mind, as Garrison is my #2 longest supported indie song-writer right after Tracy. Whatever song they wrote, it is surely the best song in the known universe.)

Last year Tracy stealthily released an acoustic disc, In The City + In The Woods. She also peppers her homepage with downloads of new demos, so I suggest you keep an eye out.

Happy birthday, Gina.

Trio Season 6 – Suite #3: A Confidence Game

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Trio: Season Six, Suite #3: A Confidence Game
Unengaged, Tangling, Wonder

A sample of what I had to say in this Trio…

Unengaged
It wasn’t the lack of confidence in doing that thing, but the lack of confidence that came in the wake of that – like, “Oh god, what have I gotten myself into?” … It’s also about [lack of] confidence in performing it: I wrote that melody almost just as an exercise in getting it up into falsetto over and over again. I didn’t ever think I was going to perform it that way. … If it’s your song, and you wrote it that way, then there must be a reason it’s in falsetto.

Tangling
It was the anchor of this set … Somebody moves out of your life for some period … and you think, “wow, we’re so connected.” And then they get back and you don’t feel that connection immediately. And you wonder – was that connection so tenuous that it dissipated with the distance? … People change over a period of time, and you have to take some time to retune that connection.

Wonder
I think anyone can identify with that walking down the street – or, in the case of this song, in a train station – and you see somebody, and in your mind you have a whole fantasy about them in a split second … and then they get on the train. Or, maybe that’s just me?


Trio – the original singer-songwriter web session – returns for its sixth season featuring my original music, recorded live and DIY in my bedroom. You can download this Trio, or listen to a previous Trio:

The Sixty One

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Editorial Note: Since I first penned this essay The Sixty One has added some terrific features, but has also experienced disappointing community turbulence, which can largely be attributed to repeatedly poor public relations response from the administrators of the site..

The Sixty One is a unique social network that allows artists and musicians to interact, and the lack of a community relations plan – or, worse, imposing a pre-defined view of community onto the site – is not the prescription for continued success.

While I still think T61 offers a unique and enjoyable user experience, I do not recommend becoming a user of the site at this time. Clearly the administrative team needs to further develop their approach to community relations policies and infrastructure and their overarching plan for the site before any further expansion can be both feasible and positive.

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Lately the focus on my crushing internet attention has been brought to bear on The Sixty One, and compelling and altogether addictive new take on music meeting social networking.

At its base, 61 is a place to discover and stream (largely free) new music. Never a bad thing. However, it’s a little more complex than that.

When you sign up as a Listener on 61, you receive a small allocation of points. You’re free to listen to your heart’s content, but if you hear something you enjoy you can use your points to promote – or “bump” – the song.

It takes the most points to bump a new song, and increasingly less points to bump songs that are already popular. Eventually a song reaches the tipping point and launches onto the main page, where it racks up dozens of bumps by the hour from even the most casual of listeners.

When the songs you promote are further promoted by others you experience a return on your investment in the form of more points, scaled based on how early you bumped a song. This makes the act of bumping (and deciding when to bump) an exercise in risk/reward strategy if you want to maximize your ability to spread your influence (points) even further.

The competitive aspect of 61 – who has the most points – isn’t difficult to game. It doesn’t take much smarts to figure out what the community likes to hear, and to bump those sorts of songs as early and as often as possible. In that position you are effectually an A&R Rep – playing the numbers game in the hopes that a fraction of your investments will reap benefits large enough to cover your losses.

If you were playing to win, you’d get pretty far pretty fast with this strategy. Of course, some A&R Reps suck at picking the big hits, either due to a tin ear or a fickle public, and if you’re indiscriminate with your points you might wind up sharing the same fate.

However, there isn’t much joy to the 61 with that approach – you quickly lose sight of discovering amazing new music … listening to it and loving it, feeling that you have to proselytize to all your friends about it, and then realizing that 61 is built explicitly to allow you to do just that.

In this role you are more of a critic – except, there is no pejorative, judgmental facet to the site – it’s all bumps. So, really you’re more like a DJ, spinning the records that deserve the most ears. As you accumulate more points you become more influential – not only due to your riches, but because you’ll gain special abilities, like multi-bumping and reviving past hits. And, your picks don’t have to shoot to success overnight – just like artists receive residuals, you’ll continue to receive points as users discover (and re-discover) the songs you’ve endorsed.

The higher your rank, and the more consistently you bump tasty tunes, the more chance other Listeners will start to take note by subscribing to you – a built in audience to cascade additional bumps down your list of favorite tunes that benefits you and the artists.

If it sounds as though Listeners have all the fun… well, they do. The Artist side of the site is much more passive – you post songs, and sit around praying and fervently spreading good will via comments on other users and songs. When your songs are bumped you win points, which eventually allows you to post more songs, thus winning you more points… et cetera.

Artists are too playing a game – a subtle contest of scarcity and demand. Listeners love discovering new songs and swarm to songs with the most activity (think: feeding frenzy). On a slow day a mediocre new song will seem like blood in open water to bored listeners, but on a busy evening your big hit could get lost in the shuffle – hopelessly marooned with a low point total until a benevolent Listener/DJ gives it a fresh spin.

If you don’t make enough points before hitting your upload limit you’re stuck schlepping your tunes around the community, fishing for an endorsement to open up a new upload spot. (And, as I discovered last night, deleting a song subtracts its points from your total – an unfortunate war of attrition.)

To take advantage of this situation, as an Artist it’s in your favor to dole out catchy tunes slowly rather than dump your catalog all at once. This will entice listeners to bump each of your songs in succession, rather than having to choose between multiple tunes.

Also, Listeners can’t vote until a song has played for at least a minute, so your first few tunes should be chosen with this in mind. The one-minute-delay also promotes research – Listeners need something to do with their 60 seconds, and if they don’t see a catalog of past successes on your page they might be looking for another reason to bump you, so make sure to have a profile image, write a bio, and leave a comment on your song.

All in all, The Sixty One it makes enjoying (and creating) music a game, a game that lacks the pejorative “bad” vote of other discovery systems, like my old favorite somesongs. If it sounds interesting to you I hope you’ll sign up (and maybe even throw some points towards Arcati Crisis)! And, if you list me (krisis) as your referrer, I’ll even make points off of your making points!

So far my favorite tunes have been:

  • Anj Granieri — Former Stranger – On this tune the S. Jersey native sounds like an improbably cheery mashup of Dresden Dolls, Rasputina, and Des’Ree. She makes her Tin Angel debut on April 3rd – I may stop by.
  • The Box Social — Hot Damn! – Fuzzy hot rock in the Jet mold, but they’ll raise you great vocals and much more cowbell.
  • STEFY — Chelsea – Awesomely trashy electro-pop built on a rip-off of the riff from “Sweet Dreams.”
  • Wonkavision — Double-Dealing – Boy/Girl indie pop duet sounds suspiciously like New Pornographers, but jangly and loose in all the best ways.
  • grinConvention — Your Name – The Shirley Manson of T61: sultry female singer fronting an act across international boundaries.
  • Shearwater — Rooks – Snow Patrol with heart and reverb.