Hell of a week last week. The band and I had our debut doubleheader; Thursday at Summit Coffee in Davidson (which could barely contain the Rock N’ Roll as our merch kept rockin’ off the table we set up) and then Friday at Earl’s in Winston-Salem (which was a blast and has such an amazing stage setup, see pic below). 5 hours of Rock N’ Roll over two days was… awesome and exhausting. It’s been like a year since I put on a full on Rock show and Saturday morning I could definitely feel it some, but I love it. I didn’t quite realize how much I missed playing with a band until this past week. It was so re-energizing. I’m really looking forward to Saturday’s show with the boys up in Sparta at the Muddy Creek Cafe & Music Hall. Thanks to everyone who came out last week. It was great to see some familiar faces and be able to give them something new with the full band experience. I’m so grateful for how supportive Summit, Davidson and the great state of North Carolina have been since I’ve moved here. Definitely feels like we’ll be here for a long, long time…
I don’t have a great story for y’all today so here are some of Bradley’s patented random thoughts…
Random thought #1: The Super Bowl
It’s amazing that the Chiefs only needed 6-7 minutes (of game time) of Patrick Mahomes magic to win a Super Bowl. He’s incredible. 3 straight touchdown drives in the 4th quarter was more than the 49ers could muster over the entire game. Credit the Chiefs defense for 3 straight stops too but man, is Pat Mahomes unreal and so much fun to root for. The Chiefs’ fans deserve every bit of joy they are experiencing right now after some horrible, horrible, horrible playoff losses over the years; most of which were in KC which makes them even worse. So, drink this in. You have the best and most fun player in the league, who at 24 is just beginning his journey. As a Packers fan, I can tell you there will be times when you get frustrated that you’re not winning even more but remember to enjoy having a magician as a QB. After 25+ years of amazing QB play like we’ve had with the Packers, you can easily get used to winning, but fight against that. Winning should be exciting and never taken for granted. The 2017 and 2018 Packers’ seasons reinforced that for me. Have fun, Chiefs’ fans, these coming years will be exciting to watch.
Mahomes really reminds me of Brett Favre; unafraid, fun but fiery at times, unaffected by his mistakes, never out of a football game, can turn games in a matter of minutes, cannon arms, beloved by teammates, beloved by all football fans (unless you’re playing against him, but even then you still mostly love him), once in a generation type talent, plays a very fun style of football, is coached by Andy Reid, really trusts his receivers to make plays, maybe takes a few too many hits during a game but always bounces right back up and you love him for it, will make some mistakes because he thinks he can do anything (and usually can), wants to put the team and game on his shoulders (has a “we’re gonna win or lose because of me but I’m gonna go down fighting” type feel to some games), etc. I could go on but you get the point. I’m not sure there has been a universally-liked player like Favre until now. Like Favre did, Mahomes could create an entire generation of Chiefs fans who gravitated to the team just because of him. St. Louis fans need someone to cheer for these days. There’s more than a couple neighboring states that don’t have a team who could easily be talked into the Chiefs. We’ll see. But, he’s the first guy in a long time that could pull that off.
Random Thought #2: The Halftime Show
I rarely say this these days, but I was actually quite entertained by the Halftime show. I think it’s due to the fact that I have been a Shakira supporter since she put out “Laundry Service” back in the early 2000’s and talked about how AC/DC was one of her favorite bands growing up. She’s likely the hottest girl to say that ever and she still is insanely sexy. She doesn’t look like she’s aged at all since then. I’m not sure how that works. J. Lo was, fine, but that’s all I expected from her. I will say I think she wore the legally lowest amount of clothing for live TV. But, congrats to them both as I normally hate everything Halftime related nowadays.
Top Super Bowl Halftime moment that no one will ever top: Bruce Springsteen running full speed, knee-sliding and slamming his dick right into all of America’s face in full HD back in ‘09. Good times…
Random Thought #3: My Love for Female Singers
I’m not sure why this is, it could perhaps even be Asperger’s related as I’ve heard a couple other Aspies say the same thing, but I much prefer the sound of women singing as compared to men. Outside of a couple notable examples like Otis Redding, Smokey Robinson, Jeff Buckley, Bruce, etc., I find I tend to lean towards bands/singers who are female. It just sounds better to me. Like the female voice was made for singing and most men are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole to do so. It’s not that I hate men’s voices, they’re just usually not as good, at least to my ear.
Two things made this abundantly clear this past week: a Spotify playlist and an acoustic show I just played. The playlist was all my “newer” music (some is not exactly new, but new-ish to me) that I’ve been loving over the past couple years. It included:
Dead Sara
Land of Talk
Courtney Marie Andrews
Joan Shelley
Oshwa
The Jezabels
Makthaverskan
All are more or less rock-ish type bands and they all have female lead singers. If you don’t know these artists look ‘em up. Dead Sara was one of the best balls-to-the-wall Rock N’ Roll shows I’ve ever seen and Land of Talk rocked way harder live than I anticipated. Courtney Marie Andrews once helped me get home during a terrible snow storm. OK, not literally, but I once was snowed in for two days in Eastern Oregon. On the third day, they finally reopened the highways but it was still coming down like crazy. I decided to brave it and make the (what was normally a 5-6 hour) drive back across the state. But, since this was the first day of the highways being back open there was still over a foot of snow on them. The only way I could drive was to be behind a snow plow which I followed for the first 4-5 hours of my trip. Even then, the road was so treacherous that I was sliding all over like crazy which was super nerve-racking as the only other vehicles on the road were semi trucks, and they were all driving like there wasn’t a foot of snow on the ground and it wasn’t a super windy mountain pass we were going through. With a semi behind me who couldn’t slow down at all coming down the hills and the semis on the other side of the highway driving mostly all over the roads as they slid around the sharp corners, not to mention we were on a fucking mountain with lots of places you could easily slide over the edge, I figured it was 50/50 that I was going to die that day. If something happened it could take hours for an ambulance to get up there. As I white-knuckled it for almost 10 hours on that trip (it got better as we got out of the mountains), the CD in the player was Courtney Marie Andrews’ “Honest Life.” I tried a couple times to change it but each time the car started to slide out of control or I had to try and avoid getting hit by a semi that had drifted over into our side of the highway, so I just left it in on repeat and listened to that album for 10 hours straight. Luckily, it’s a great album…
As for the acoustic show, I was going back over the setlist to see what I liked/didn’t like/etc. for the next one when I realized all but 1 of the cover songs I played were originally sung by women. Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” was the only male cover I did that night. The other covers were all from women: “Landslide,” “Jolene,” “Shake it Off,” “Strong Enough.” Most of the time, I just prefer listening to women’s voices so it’s no wonder that trickled into the songs I chose to play. It’s not always that way, I’ll usually throw in a Bruce or Ryan Adams or Tom Petty or Rolling Stones song somewhere in there, but not that night. Wasn’t feeling those ones. Even on our upcoming project, I’m trying to get my wife, Brianne, to sing more lead than me. Songs I wrote for me to sing still sound better to me when sung by a woman. Sometimes, I feel like I was supposed to be a female Rock N’ Roll singer and they had a screw up at the body factory when I was born and I came out male, but I still have that female rock singer inside me. Or, I just like the sound of women’s voices better. Who knows…
Random Thought #4: THIS EXISTS?!
Yep, Peanut Butter flavored whiskey. AND… it’s pretty good.
Random Thought #5: What People Give for our Entertainment
While watching the Super Bowl, WWE, and the final episodes of BoJack Horseman this week, I was struck by how much people give of themselves for our entertainment. In wrestling and football, it’s their bodies, potentially their brains, years off the end of their lives, years spent away from their families, etc. So many of these men and women end up as a wreck physically. How could they not? In football, all the hits are like getting into dozens of car crashes on the same day, all in row. Those add up over time. I was working out today and one of the virtual trainers mentioned how one of his shoulders and one of his hips don’t move the way should from his years of playing. In wrestling, it’s not quite as violent (at least these days. The Attitude Era got pretty extreme towards the end…), but it’s 3-4 nights a week. Oh, and you’re considered a contractor so there’s no health insurance for the beating your body takes on those 3-4 nights per week. It’s hard to hear some of the stories where ex-WWEers can’t walk straight, can’t move without pain, move their bodies in any normal way, etc. after their careers are over. Or the stories of guys who have to keep wrestling well into their fifties (and sometimes beyond) or they won’t be able to afford to take care of their bodies, even though it’s the wrestling that’s doing it to them.
And sure, I know some of you out there are saying “well, they choose to do that and make millions from it.” True, in some cases. But, think of all the athletes and entertainers who aren’t making millions. There’s far more of them and they’re still doing the same damn thing for our viewing pleasure.
So why did I mention BoJack, the cartoon horse from an animated television show? He doesn’t really exist and therefore hasn’t sacrificed anything for us. Well, someone did. And there are lots of people out there who are sacrificing right now. Hell, even the voice himself, Will Arnett himself struggled with alcoholism and depression, possibly more, just like BoJack. To make that character so real, the writers must have struggled or seen the struggles of those out there so they could put it all together in BoJack. All for our entertainment.
Closer to home, think of musicians, like me. I have struggled with, or am still struggling with, drugs, alcohol, depression, suicidal thoughts and the like over the years. Part of that was bound to happen anyways, but part of it is because of the music. The same can probably be said for any performer, but it takes so much from you and you need to find a way to replace that. You’re giving so much of yourself, your time, your energy, your life, really.
It’s funny that some of my friends think I make really good money (I don’t. I’m so fucking grateful that I actually get paid to play music, but my last sales job paid about 4-5 times more) because they hear I’ll make $X amount for a two-hour show. “That much for two hours? That’s amazing!” Until you explain how much time went into researching venues, sending out countless booking emails, the band rehearsals, the travel, etc. and then you realize what that roughly comes out to per hour and it’s not so enticing to them anymore.
Think of everything that goes into the last song you just played on Spotify. By the time you hear a song from one of my records, these are the things that likely have already happened:
I’ve spent multiple hours writing, arranging and finishing the words and music
I then spend some more time recording a demo to send to the band
The bands spends hours listening to, writing/finalizing their parts
The band and I spend hours rehearsing said song over and over trying to find the perfect feel, parts, adding in accents, little tweaks, etc. along the way
We’ll travel for hours to shows, playing that song live to get a better feel of what we like, what we need to change, etc.
We’ll spend more hours changing, tweaking parts, trying new things to see what makes it better, what makes it worse and what makes it different from the other songs we have
Then we’ll spend more hours in the studio recording the song
Then we’ll spend more hours listening to the mixes of those recordings and tweaking those
We’ll spend more hours going over the recorded song as a whole figuring out how and where it best fits on the album, or it should be on the album at all
We’ll spend more hours listening to the mastered versions to make sure the track order is correct, every song lives and breathes the way it should, and that the final product is what we want
We’ll spend hours coming up with and designing the album art
More hours will be spent taking promo photos for the upcoming record
Then we’ll spend hours finding the right publicist/company to promote the album
Then we’ll spend hours planning and prepping the release of the album and a release show/tour
THEN FINALLY, you can open up Spotify, click on the song and listen to the damn thing; where we make almost no money from it…
That’s just off the top of my head. There’s certainly steps that I’ve missed but that’s a pretty fucking good idea of what we’re doing and how long it takes to get this music to you. I’m not complaining, but just want people to know. Music has been so devalued as of late, that it’s hard for me to not rant about it. For most people, music is something that you play in the background while you do laundry or workout. Or something that’s on at the bar (possibly it’s even a live band) that you can ignore while you talk with your friends. A song is plucked from an album that took hundreds of hours to build. Look, I get it. Not every piece of music is for everyone. A lot of people make music to be background sound, or just have a song or two they want you to hear and the rest is filler. But, some people, like me, still regard music-making as a work of art. I consider it to be a noble undertaking. So, when it’s relegated to sound for sound’s sake, it’s tough. To me, music is like a beautiful painting or an amazing novel or a delicious meal from a restaurant, it’s meant to have time devoted to it. It’s meant to be savored. It’s meant to be your sole focus when your ingesting it. Maybe I’m just old (I’m not, but I feel like it sometimes), but I still think listening to music is an activity unto itself. When I fire up the turntable, I play ‘em start to finish. It’s my own weird house rule, once that needle touches down, the album will be played in its entirety, both sides, every time.
I still even struggle to have conversations with people when music is playing. Some of that is the Asperger’s, as my mind goes all over the place and I struggle to focus enough to talk with someone longer than a sentence or two. So, I don’t need another distraction to further throw me off. I have no clue how people listen to music and read. Both require 100% of my focus, and last I checked, I still only have 100% to divvy up.
But, the other part of me is thinking there’s millions of albums out there to listen to, so I do actually appreciate it when someone chooses one of mine, no matter what the circumstance. I’d rather play a show where half the audience is drunk and not paying attention than sit at home and play to myself. So, I see both sides. Again, I’m grateful that I have the opportunity to write, record and play music, and, on top of that, I get paid to do it. That is special. I’m a lucky man. I do understand that, that’s not what I’m talking about here. I just wanted to give a glimpse into what we give of ourselves for your listening pleasure.
Wow, I’ll get down off my soap box now. That certainly stirred something in me.
Anyways, Monday Night Raw is about to come on, so I have to go…
(dictated but not read)
I think this was the only picture we had from Summit where I’m actually in focus AND not making a weird face. I move too much and make lots of weird faces when I sing/play…
What did I tell you? Earl’s stage is pretty and the show was a lot of fun. Here’s the boys setting up…