A person has asked me, by email, to outline what I’d like to see in an Albany music festival. Figured I may as well share my response in this space; I tried to keep it short.

I’d like to see a weekend festival that:
1. Features multiple venues all over town, including performances on both the UAlbany and Saint Rose campuses… college kids are the Albany arts community’s greatest untapped resource.
2. Includes at least one noteworthy, contemporary national headliner per show.
3. Does NOT favor local bands… Sonicbids should be used to allow artists to apply for showcases from anywhere (and the application fee can go towards paying the national headliners). I think we serve the region best by making it a magnet for artists and art-lovers, not by simply gathering a pile of the same local acts people here can see anytime. Don’t get me wrong – locals should play; I just think competition from outside is a good thing, for many reasons.
4. Encourages all performers to busk around town, at malls and on college campuses to promote their appearances, and encourages non-participating venues to independently host art and musical performances for the weekend.

Anyway, those are my basic thoughts… it would be a significant undertaking, but even if it builds slowly, I think we could have something very special here in a matter of years. It’s not so much about consolidating the current music scene as it is about changing the culture, enouraging locals and students who have never thought twice about music and art to become interested and proud of it…

Comments are open… will I regret this?

Drove around Long Island today with Jax. We followed the Babylon LIRR line down Sunrise Highway, then buzzed Route 110 for a while and ended up cruising several Main Streets before spending an hour or so on a desolate Jones Beach.

Long Island is the ugliest fuckin place in America. I can say this with 100% confidence – I just spent a week driving across Texas.

An unending sprawl of amateur-hour signage screaming from fly-by-night-looking storefronts on dingy, squat concrete slab buildings, broken up by the occasional brown and scrubby public space. Was Long Island always this disgusting? It must have been like this when I was growing up… most of the nasty shit I saw today appeared unimproved since the late ’80s. How did I not notice?

Downstate NY friends who snicker at my Albany move: come visit. See how charming and cool an old city can be when you don’t smother it in tacky bullshit, traffic and cement. Yeah, fine, we have Central Ave. But fuck. Your entire ISLAND is Central Ave.

Been thinking about the single-of-the-month approach. I’ve made new material available this way since April, one fully-mastered hi-fi track at a time, with the occasional pause for an album-length release. And I really like it.

The 7th of every month is my day. (If you’re reading this because you give a shit, then let’s call it our day!) I can keep music steadily rolling out while working at my usual deliberate pace behind the scenes. Costs stay down because I’m not biting off entire albums at once. And every new track becomes important because each is featured for an entire month. It’s good. I feel like all the model needs is some fine-tuning.

First of all, I’m gonna start folding Sevendys tracks into the process. I think it’s confusing and distracting to say I’m gonna bring out one thing every month on such and such a day, but then go ahead and release additional tracks at random. Whenever a Sevendys track is ready, it’ll come out simultaneously on my music site and the Sevendys site on the 7th of the month.

Also, I still like albums. I like to think of songs as belonging with a collection of other contextually appropriate songs, best enjoyed together and offered in an optional physical format which might enhance the listening experience even further. Every single I’ve released since April has been, in my mind, lifted from an album to come.

I’m going to meet the process halfway on this one. Going forward, I’m going to define “album” a little differently than I have been: no longer so much an aggregate of component songs as it is a container for songs.

For example, I have ten songs that I’ve been working on which, in my opinion, will sound great together as an album I’ve decided to call Failing Upwards. Four of them are mixed and ready to go; six are still being polished. I am slowly filling up the Failing Upwards bucket with finished tracks. When the bucket is full, you get the whole thing at once with a physical version offered. Prior to that, the tracks arrive as completed, one at a time, mixed in with other singles-of-the-month which are slowly filling other buckets.

So I kind of no longer make albums; I make music buckets.

I’ve already been doing this in a way with the Green Plaid Recordings. I bring those out as they happen and kind of sneak them up onto that page. If I can make one sound better after it’s been put online, I’ll just replace it. There’s no real plan for that stuff; I don’t even know how much of it there actually is. But eventually all of the appropriate material will be there, and it will sound as good as my crack team of engineers can make it sound, and then I’ll consider that bucket full and get you a nicely mastered digital version and an interesting physical version.

I can tell you that right now I am working to fill quite a few buckets, with the goal of completing at least one a year. These include, but are not limited to: three solo buckets, the Sevendys bucket, the Green Plaid bucket, two Skyscape buckets and two Hanslick Rebellion buckets (one of which used to be the Jeebus bucket, but it’s the same exact band so we figured what the fuck). And a Rise and Shine bucket.

One more thing.
Lately I’ve been listening back to some of my mid-90s sequence-based stuff: Physics, We’re All Going To Jail!, Blowing Shit Up. A great deal of this material was written to be performed by live musicians on acoustic and analog instruments, but I didn’t have access to any of the above so it’s all programmed and recorded right out of my keyboard – everything from the drums and bass to the horns and piano. I’ve often considered going back and reworking the recordings with a band, ditching the canned sounds. In fact, the Rebellion has cut new versions of some BSU stuff, which you’ll hear eventually, and a few of the WAGTJ songs may end up getting reimagined by Sevendys because the fit is there. On the whole, though, I don’t think I’ll be doing any full-scale rebooting of these albums. While far from perfect, they kind of are what they are – raw, of their time and not without charm. I’d rather forge ahead with new material for now.