Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

music

Making Music Work: Should You Say Yes To Everything?

by

This a post in my new column, “Making Music Work,” where I take a look at the challenges facing local, indie musicians.

As a musician it’s hard to say no. But, should you always say yes?

There are a lot of positives to saying yes. More chances to play, which means more experience and more audience. Networking opportunities. A chance to pad your resume of shows. In the words of actress and singer Ashley Davidson Hughson, “work begets work; you never know who might be in the audience that night.”

Except, playing your music isn’t all about you. It’s about your music. It’s about your fans, both old and new. It’s about the person running the room making a profit. It’s about other acts on the bill getting exposed to a new audience.

With that in mind, when should you say no? I polled my network of professional and amateur performers, and we came up with these major reasons. [Read more…] about Making Music Work: Should You Say Yes To Everything?

#blamedrewscancer’s Blame-a-Thon Explained!

by

(Yes, I still owe you one last skydiving post. Suck it up, people. It’s coming.)

So, you’re a cancer blamer but you’re not sure what this whole Blame a-Thon thing is about? Never fear – we’re here with answers to all of your questions (and, by “we” I mean me talking about myself in the third person). [Read more…] about #blamedrewscancer’s Blame-a-Thon Explained!

Man In the Mirror

by

Now a month after he passed, the MJ hoopla continues.

Rolling Stone finally got around to shipping an issue with him on the cover, with a solid accompanying article tracking his whereabouts over the last two years. Still has its lurid bits – prosthetic nose and Latoya trolling through Neverland looking for bags of cash – but it’s more of a portrait than most of the continuing coverage.

The thing that gets me about all the coverage is that people still don’t seem to know all that much about Michael Jackson as a musician. Like anything else, it’s just an echo chamber of the same small handful of facts on spin cycle.

For example, “Man in the Mirror” – a fantastically constructed song that has leapfrogged all of his freaky-video hits to become his official theme and lament. So very Michael, right? Definitive?

It may have been definitive, but it was one of the few big hits of MJ’s solo career that he didn’t have a songwriting credit on. It was penned by Siedah Garrett – an 80s pop artist, songwriter, and killer backing vocalist (frequently with Madonna), and arranged with Glen Ballard, best know as the co-writer and producer of Jagged Little Pill (as well as the debut of Wilson Phillips).

Rolling Stone‘s fantastic Smoking Section just interviewed Ballard about how “Mirror” got onto Bad at the last second.

Siedah and I wrote it for him directly. It was near the end of the recording for Bad — it was the last weekend before they wrapped up Bad — and think I had written something for the album but it didn’t get accepted. Quincy [Jones, Bad‘s producer] called me and said, “Don’t you have anything else for us?” He thought we were idiots not to try again, and Siedah had an idea, and we got together on a Saturday night, met at my house in Encino, and we just wrote it on the spot. It was really simple, we just wrote it on a Fender Rhodes, and did a quick demo with Siedah singing. It felt really good, but you never know. And we didn’t have time to dress it up, so I didn’t feel like it had a chance.

As for Siedah, at a recent service she briefly eulogized Jackson and then delivered an unbelievable solo turn on the song, backed by the tremendous Agape International Choir.

I started working on my cover of “Man in the Mirror” sometime last fall, and it only started coming together a week or two before Michael died. I love playing it, but I might need to wait a few months before doing it at open mics feels something other than opportunistic.

I’m sorry that Michael Jackson coverage has reached a point of backlash. Honestly, I would listen to him all day and cry two months ago, so I don’t see why I can’t keep doing it now.

Filmstar. Rock’n’Roll Star. Wife.

by

Elise & Co. (aka Filmstar) rocked an amazing show tonight at the M-Room, followed by the obscenely sexy and awesome Stone Thrown (like Muse, but Philly-local and half-Asian).

Here’s Filmstar’s newest tune, which I am in love with. Note the Bowie / Karen O. dual influences.

(Or, head to YouTube to watch “Rock & Roll Star.”)

There is prelim talk of a worlds-colliding Filmstar v. Arcati Crisis party/show sometime in the fall. If that were to happen, I would play the shit out of a tambourine on that song.

whiling away the hours

by

(1) A few years ago I saw Malcolm Gladwell deliver a speech at the New Yorker Festival that is largely recapitulated in the second chapter of Outliers, called “The 10,000 Hour Rule.”

In it, Gladwell draws our attention to a data point converged upon by countless studies of experts in a variety of fields. He says, “In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.” He goes on to quote neurologist Daniel Levitin:

In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. … It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

Gladwell supports the rule using Mozart, Bill Gates, Bill Joy, and the Beatles as his examples. Not to say that their genius and success is purely a result of 10,000 hours of practice – the book as a whole explains other facets – just that it was an essential component of their expertise.

.

(2a) 10,000 hours is a long time.

If as a child starting at age five you had piano lessons two times a week (an hour each) and also practiced an hour a day, you would clock nine hours a week. 468 hours a year. 4,680 hours a decade.

If you kept that up until age 26 you’d finally have served your time.

(2b) 10,000 hours can go by before you know it.

Maybe you got into video games at age 11. You played them every night after homework and dinner, let’s say from 7:30 to 11:00 p.m. on most nights, plus extra on the weekend. That’s more than 25 hours a week. 1,300 plus a year.

You’d be a master by the time you started college. Most kids are.

(2c) Time is relative.

.

(3) In the car today Gina and I were singing in harmony to the amazing Hezekiah Jones album Hezekiah Says You’re A-OK, on the way to see his band split a bill with the equally fantastic Up the Chain.

“You know, Gina,” I said, breaking from my lead vocal, “I’ve been thinking about this 10,000 hour thing. Not everyone’s an expert at something. I mean, what do most people spend 10,000 hours doing by the time they’re 25? Watching teevee, I suppose.”

“More than likely,” she replied.

“But, think about me. I watched a lot of television, sure. Mostly, though, I read until I was old enough to write, and then I wrote and read. That’s what I spent my 10k on.”

(Perhaps she interjected, “Oh, I remember.”)

“And, you know, is it any surprise that I’m good at communications? I’m not an expert, but no wonder it’s my calling. I spent my whole life practicing for it.”

We sat and sang for a moment, contemplating that.

“What about you?”

Gina paused in her harmony. “Hmm, me?”

“Yeah. What did you spend 10,000 hours doing?”

“This. Listening to music. Singing harmony.”

“Really your whole life, right? Your mother singing, your father playing guitar…”

“Yeah, since I can remember.”

“Right. So, no matter how much I rehearse, you’ll always have the edge. It’ll always come easier to you, until I reach that threshold.”

“I suppose.”

We paused as the song wound down.

“What do you think Hezekiah spent 10,000 hours doing?”

We thought on that for a few moments, and then sang together to “Albert Hash.”

.

(4) We’re not all Mozart. I might not ever be Hezekiah Jones. But, we’ve all spent 10,000 hours doing something other than sleeping, and hopefully other than watching television. Maybe something incidental that we do out of necessity or habit. Driving? Social-networking? Cleaning? Taking care of children?

I’ve put in more than my share on communications – reading cereal boxes and trashy fantasy novels, writing stories at eight on my manual typewriter and almost nine years of blogs.

I got an early start on 10,000 hours of being Gina’s best friend, which I keep padding. I’m really good at that. More recently I’ve attained well-in-excess of 10,000 hours of being in love with Elise.

I hope eventually I’ll reach my 10,000th hour of serious focus on music. It’s a large piggy-bank of time to fill.

What about you? What have you spent your life mastering, intentionally or unintentionally?