I wrote a lot growing up. I wrote poems and short stories and crappy novels. Because writing was the one hobby I had that most of my aunts and uncles knew about, I got a lot of journals and decorative notebooks for birthdays and Christmases. I never used any of them. I stuck to lose leaf lined paper.
I was afraid to use the fancy journals! Blank notebooks, empty reams of typewriter paper – these are things of inspiration. But add just a single mark to the first page, and that inspiration starts to fade – the promise of what that journal could have become has been fulfilled.
I probably sound crazy now.
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Welcome to my completely redesigned, recoded and rebuilt website!
There are so many cool things about this little website that I’ve been working non-stop on over the past seven days.
First, and probably most importantly, you can now stream EVERY song on my site. Not only that, but you can stream every song in high-quality. Most of the mp3s have been encoded at 256kbps, which eats up my bandwidth dollars, but will sound very pleasant to your ears.
Along side those streaming songs, you will find lyrics and chords and album artwork for every song. And for every song that appears on an album or EP, I’ve created a really cool “track list navigation sidebar” tool, so you can hop from any song to any song without digging through endless menus or using your browser’s back button. Take THAT bands who artificially inflate page views by using sub par navigation menus!
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At the end of every year, I sit down and write out my short-term and long-term goals. Just to make sure life is on track with what makes me happy. And to help correct my direction if it isn’t. Tonight’s goal list is probably the most ambitious and exciting it’s ever been.
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About once every three months I get to be really depressed for a few minutes, and then really proud for a few minutes. O’Reilly, the publisher that released my YouTube book, sends me quarterly royalty statements. I just got one of those statements this morning.
This past quarter I sold 295 copies of my YouTube book. After two years of being available, that’s not too bad. The book sells at a retail price of $29.95, so that’s $8,835.25 for 295 copies sold. That means I’m taking everyone out to dinner at Red Lobster right? Hah, no.
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With how much work there is – and how fast it all needs to be done – for DFTBA Records, sometimes it’s hard for me to see the big picture. Being so focused on the daily tasks of packing orders, or designing artwork, or cutting checks to our artists, etc, sometimes it all just blends together.
Alex Day and I talk about future personal projects often when we chat, and pretty much since the beginning of DFTBA’s existence I’ve told him I wanted to release a covers CD, where our artists just cover each other’s songs. It’d be fun, it’d be a celebration of the label, it’d be a good way for fans of one artist to be exposed to the music of another artist… and I just plain love covers (as anyone who owns my album Erase This knows).
But I kept putting it off. [click to read more…]
