Over 280,000 views on YouTube. Over 3,000 digital singles sold. With an additional 4,000 full-length albums sold. All for a song I was ready to delete one November night in 2009.
I was in the middle of working on my debut album Erase This. I had written this fun little track about dailybooth photos, relationship statuses and two teens wanting to escape their opprosive, dull little town after losing their virginity to each other.
I ignored the song for a few days after I had finished writing it. It was kinda nerdy. Kinda fun. I don’t write nerdy. I don’t write fun. I write serious songs with concepts and story arcs and casts of characters.
After getting over myself, I emailed the lyrics to a group of about ten different musician friends. I told them I’d given up on including the song on Erase This and asked if anyone wanted to work together on releasing it as a one-off single.
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This entire post is a response to the article “What Happened To You?” written by Kristen Franklin… who also happens to be my beautiful girlfriend. I started writing it as a comment and then decided I wanted to share it here. Go read her article first if you’d like…
I still pretend and day dream a lot. It’s fun. I know my day dreams aren’t real, and that my life is not all that grand. But I’m happy with my life, so the day dreams are just… entertainment.
I think we all lose a little of that wide-eye’d-ness as we get older. Because we’ve lived through more failures than successes, usually, and we no longer imagine it’ll be different the next time around. We no longer belive we can be an astronaut, or a rock star… or a lion.
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Last night VH1 ran a repeat of their Top 100 Hard Rock Songs countdown. It was glorious.
The countdown was suspiciously overrun with 80s hair metal, though. But that’s okay, I like hair metal. The 80s hair metal bands of then, remind me of what being a nerd now represents. Metal bands really get into it. Make-up. Towers of flames on stage. Leather. Blood. Zombies. Any metal band’s stage show would rival the best production of Rocky Horror.
But I guess I can get into that because I also love 80s cheesy horror films. I own the entire Nightmare on Elm Street franchise on DVD, including the 3-D version of Freddy’s Dead. I have a whole box of old issues of Fangoria, the horror movie and make-up magazine. I have an autographed copy of Robert Englund’s biography. Englund played Freddy in all seven of the original movies.
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A lot of people who read this blog also write their own blogs. A lot of those people also complain that no one reads their blogs. These same people have usually never heard of search engine optimization, or SEO.
SEO is the practice of making your website and individual webpages as attractive as possible to search engines. Search engines, like Google, “crawl” your website with their bots. These bots read every line of code on your page, and catalog every word. This is awesome because Google will now add your page to their search results.
But before your webpage can show up in search results, it has to be ranked. How Google ranks a page is a bit of a “family secret” and while they don’t come right out with it, there are a few things you can do to crack that secret.
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I registered the domain name ireviewflicks.com a few months ago with every intention of reviewing movies on a regular basis (right now it just redirects to my site ireviewalbums… another well-intentioned but unutilized site). I love movies. I have a decent collection of Blu-Rays and DVDs and even VHS tapes… a paid subscription to Netflix, a paid subscription to hulu and make regular use of the local RedBox. But most movies leave me with little to say anymore. They’re okay or they’re alright. But few are game changers.
So I was surprised when two movies in one week really stuck with me. Fair Game and The Next Three Days. If you haven’t seen them yet, rent them this weekend.
Fair Game is a dramatized retelling of Valerie Plame’s life. You’ll know the name Valerie Plame if you followed politics closely a decade ago… or if you’re a huge Decemberists fan. Plame was a CIA secret agent, whose identity was leaked by our own government, putting her and her family’s lives in danger.
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