Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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The Cost of Maintaining Me

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One of the pitfalls of working in the middle of a major city is that it’s easy to blow your paycheck before it ever makes it into your bank account.

Since I don’t take actual lunch “breaks” too often (and because there is no guitar store in easy walking distance) I’ve stayed relatively insulated from midday shopping. Where I’m at risk is food.

When I first started working after graduation I was in the early throes of my obsessive budget-keeping, and I figured out quickly that the breakfast smoothies and muffins I had been accustomed to ordering every day during my internship added up to a bank-breaking amount over the course of a year – I wouldn’t have had to borrow money from my mother for a down payment on our first apartment if I had gone smoothlieless as an intern!

On my first day of full-time work I showed up with my own homemade smoothie and bagel, and continued to do so for several months, until finally my slothfulness caught up with my budget. Rather then blend up a confection every morning, I opted to allow myself a fixed weekly lunch budget to use however I pleased – buying groceries, eating modestly every day, or starving myself all week to go out for one big lunch.

Over four years of employment I’ve hewed pretty close to the budget, which rendered my $5 a day smoothie habit an obsolete luxury. The casualty was breakfast – I altogether stopped eating it, which made me a ravenous beast around 11:15 a.m.. I shrugged off plenty of health-concious co-workers bugging me to start my day with a meal, but when I began working on our healthy living initiatives earlier this year the message was drilled home by project after project: I was wrecking my naturally awesome metabolism, and I needed to eat more fresh fruit.

So, this summer when I found a nearby fruit cart that made $3.25 16oz. smoothies I was ecstatic – $16.15 a week was only a portion of my food budget, and it meant I’d actually eat my daily recommended servings of fruit. I immediately became a daily customer, and they’d have a smoothie ready to be blended when they saw me coming from a block away!

Two weeks ago my precious cart disappeared like clockwork on the first near-freezing morning, and without thinking about it I retreated to my four-year old smoothie/bagel habit. By the end of the week I had racked up $30 in spending – a huge chunk of my weekly food allowance, and over $1500 over the course of the year!

I had to put a stop to it, but I had become addicted to the energetic, breakfast-eating me I rediscovered over the summer. Could I produce my own smoothies and bagels for the convenient $16.25 I had been spending weekly over the summer?

The first hurdle was that I’d have to buy my supplies at the supermarket most convenient to me, which meant a slight markup. Five bananas came out to between $2-$3. Over the winter I’d rely on frozen organic strawberries, which were $.218 an ounce, and I’d need 50 oz. a week, for a total of $11. I’d also need a carton of off-brand OJ to fill out my concoction ($3), and a can or two of coconut milk to sweeten it a little (less than $2).

That’s a total of $18 for smoothie ingredients, proving the value of my cart-bound friend. Add to that a six-pack of everything bagels for $4 and $.90 weekly for my share of non-hydrogenated buttery spread for a total of $22.90 a week – a scant $7.10 savings over my gourmet breakfast. It would net me $555 in savings a year, but it still cost a bank-breaking $1195! And, that’s not including my time expenditure of thirty minutes of grocery shopping, plus 15 minutes a day of preparation.

No matter how I slice it, my morning smoothie is a major budget hit – a significant detraction from my ability to acquire new gear, my potential to pay off credit cards, my plan to save for a house.

Yet, what’s the comparative value of starting every day with a healthy breakfast, and getting my daily fix of fruit? Not to mention that my bagels and butter are healthier than the ones I’d be served in town. Sure, the monetary expense seems steep, but in the long term is it costing me less than the effects of eschewing fruit and starting my day with lunch?

Since the answer to that is unknowable at the moment, I’m going to have to find another way to justify my smoothie-enabling weekly shopping trips. Next steps? See if I can score my ingredients more cheaply elsewhere, or create a better economy of scale by also rolling in shopping for my lunch rather than buying it.

a little ocd is still ocd

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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.

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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.

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

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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?

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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.