Bev's Blender Brain Blog

Can Technology be Funny?

I think the key to humor is not taking yourself too seriously, and avoiding laughs at someone else's expense. Oh, and rising above the cheap and taudry laughs that appeal to 13-year olds. I like my humor on the intelligent side.

Here are two videos that I shot and edited recently for my client, FaceTime Communications. My colleagues Larissa and Sarah developed this idea and wrote the scripts. As Larissa explains in her guest post on the Bright Blue Marketing Blog, maintaining a marketing presence through an economic downturn requires some out of the box thinking.

So far so good, with more than 700 You Tube views for episode one in just one week and 125 views of episode two in the past two days.

Let me know what you think, even if you have no idea what URL filtering fees are!

Creativity: the highwire between art and commerce

Innovation is the high wire between art and commerce ... with death a distinct possibility

Jessica Hagy's Indexed blog has received several awards, including "favorite reason for the Internet to exist." I have to agree, its a favorite stopping point for me. Every morning Jessica sits down with a cup of coffee and a blank index card, and waxes philosophical with statistically irrelevant graphs.

Like this one from January 9, 2009. (thanks Jessica, for permission to reprint)

Last May, I blogged about creativity and the day job, and where I was with my own internal struggle on that topic. Seeing Jessica's statistically irrelevant graph prompted me to think about where I'm at now.

Its clear that this topic is on more minds than just mine. Last November, Christine Kane blogged about whether or not "going pro" can squeeze the joy out of your passion, prompted by a blog by Seth Godin. I agree with Christine's assessment - I'm paraphrasing to match my theme here, but the gist is that the happiest people are the ones who decide how they are going to balance art and commerce in their lives. (read her whole post linked above, its very good)

Last week we had a surprise visit from a friend and touring musician, Hans York. I love Hans. He called us in the morning and said he'd be passing through the area later that day and asked if we had time to hang out. We invited him to stay the night, and he made us a fantastic dinner - I mean Michelin Five Star fantastic. But I digress. (and I'm still drooling...) Hans, Greg and I talked about this topic of art, creativity and money that night.

I moderated a panel at the 2008 FAR-West conference on touring strategies for independent acoustic musicians with Hans, Freebo, Cosy Sheridan and TR Ritchie. We talked a lot about balance in that session. Staying grounded, taking care of yourself, making yourself available to innovate.

Freebo is spending more time at home in LA these days, doing creativity workshops. Cosy and TR stay out about 2-3 weeks, then "head home to the barn" in Moab Utah where they run the Moab Folk Camp. Hans tours for about three months at a time - and that's really hard. All agreed that balance comes from searching out those situations that renew and revive. In Hans' case, it means not getting caught up in the quest for the big stages (not that he doesn't love playing them) but rather enjoying the intimacy and soul-feeding experience of playing house concerts.

Which brings me to last Friday night, January 9 - the day Jessica posted her indexed graph on commerce and art.

In our living room, we hosted a house concert featuring Randall Williams, another good friend and touring musician. Randall, like Freebo, Cosy, TR and Hans, is someone who has always made his living by his art. He's traveled the world - some of it solo in a very small sail boat. He's written a book about that trip, called The Sea Inside. He's taught clinics, written a book and cut an instructional DVD on partial capo techniques for Kyser. He's also currently on David Wilcox's PR/social media team.

So all of those things that are outside of writing, recording and performing his own music, would be his "day job," right? Those collective experiences are what drive Randall's innovation. The crazy high wire of booking, driving, marketing, teaching, etc. - it all impacts his writing, recording and performing. How could it not?

So here's where I am with this now: I think every innovative artist is the sum of all his or her life experiences, whether those experiences are with driving children around your home town, international travel, heartbreak, elder care or a day job related to music, PR, technology, or whatever. At the end of the day - or the end of the concert - were you moved? If so, who cares where they took their lunch break that day?

blog republished 1/15 with corrected links. and spellilng.

Scrabble, community, and what I learned from my mother over Christmas

Greg and I just spent four great days with my mom and dad in Texas, about an hour outside of Austin. No schedule, very quiet ... lots of time for napping, afternoon wine and Scrabble.

My mother is a Scrabble shark.

Over the past four or five years of visits to Texas I had never beaten my mother at Scrabble - until now. I finally realized that while I was growing up and she was teaching me to play nice, preparing me for a community-minded adulthood where I value creativity and pride myself on creating opportunities for others, what she was really doing was plotting her Scrabble domination strategy.

You see, I look at the Scrabble board and want to play a long word that will open up more opportunity for others to play. I look at those seven letters before me and I try to create something beautiful - the perfect word for the perfect spot on the board. While my mother - the artist - looks at how she can score 45 points with one letter.

This time, I finally got it. I chose not to care that the entire upper left section of the board was blank. I played the word WEIRD, capitalizing on mother's "FAKE," which included the high scoring "K." I found numerous other opportunities for those 'one letter takes all' kind of moves. Final score? Bev 301, Mom 265. Ha! Got her!

True to motherhood, she was very happy for me. And she didn't even point out that she was the one who suggested I play ANTSY, which racked up a whole bunch of points.

So what was the lesson learned? Community is wonderful. Creating opportunities for others is still the best way to conduct my life and engage that community. But maybe, just maybe, there are times when I need to make sure I really understand the rules of the game and use them to my advantage. And the experts at the game might even notice my community-mindedness and offer to help me out with the tough spots, even when I get antsy about it.

Thanks mom.

Happy birthday mom - there's nothing better to be thankful for

My mom's birthday often falls on or around Thanksgiving. Today, Thanksgiving 2008, is an "on" birthday. So I'm going to get a little mushy here, be forewarned. Today, I am most thankful for my mother.

I've been thinking a lot about the mother daughter thing lately. My own daughter is 17 and in the midst of applying to colleges, which means I have less than a year to enjoy her then she'll be gone.  My step daughter will be 18 in four months and is working very hard to be independent, which means we have even less time with her. Mother and daugther relationships are tricky business indeed.

My own relationship with my mother has developed as I suppose most do over the years. I've grown to appreciate so many wonderful qualities and insights that she has, things that I was not able to see when I was younger and she was annoyed by the greasy cold water left standing in dirty bowls in the sink (and yes, now I complain about that to my own kids).

My mother is an artist - a wonderfully sensitive and creative artist. Her works in watercolor and hand made paper now adorn my walls and I think of her every day as I enjoy them. Even though I never call to tell her that. Although I didn't realize it while I was growing up, I know now that she's had a tremendous impact on the way I view the world. Seeing through the eyes of an artist means everything is possible, everything has beauty and everything can be shaped into something new.

One of the most touching and loving things my mother has ever done for me was to send me a note in the mail after a phone conversation we had, which told me she understood one of the most difficult decisions I've ever had to make. With the soft image of hyacinths, she wrote this Persian proverb:

If you of all your goods are suddenly bereft,
and of your worldly store two loaves alone to thee are left,
sell one and with the dole
buy hyacinths to soothe your soul

I love you mother. Happy Thanksgiving, and happy birthday.

Is the real product the song, or the CD?

When Taylor Swift's new CD came out, I took my 17-year-old daughter straight to Target after school to buy it. Yes, the PHYSICAL CD. Taylor Swift is her favorite artist, and she listens to her CD before every track meet.

But why, you may ask, would a 17 year old buy an actual CD rather than the download? Well I wish I could say that its because she wanted the experience of holding it in her hands, savoring the liner notes, appreciating the care with which the songs were chosen and ordered, perusing the credits to see who wrote the songs, who's playing the guitar solos... you know, all those reasons those of us who are older than 30 understand. 

But the real reason is that she's driving her dad's 1999 Acura, which is too old to have an iPOD jack and too new to have a tape player to plug in one of those converters. So the CD is more practical.

But thinking about this brought me back to this core question: is the product the song, or the CD?

I mentioned in an earlier blog post that songwriters (and writers in general) are the only artists who create something out of nothing. No raw materials are used in the creation of a song. The intellectual property that's created is the song... so maybe the physical or digital media that carries it is more like the mat and frame would be in the case of a painting? So is it up to the artist, or the buyer, to choose the matting and frame?

With both our CD products we agonized over song order. Everyone does. You see, to the artist, these songs are glimpses into our souls. Choosing what feel you want that first track to invoke, deciding what flows into what, how the entire project builds and releases over the course of 10 or 12 tracks - this process is part of the art.

Then, 9 times out of 10 the tracks are dumped into iTunes and sorted alphabetically. In the end I suppose its the buyers choice, but you can miss a lot that way.

In the case of our Christmas CD, Starry, Starry Night, for example, there is a bonus track (track 11) that isn't noted anywhere on the track listing or liner notes. After about 30 seconds of silence, you hear a verbal exchange... "are you ready?"  "no!"  "1-2-3-4..."

Ready or not, the music starts. Its my son Kevin playing Jingle Bells on the trumpet in 6th grade after only two months of lessons, accompanied by my stepson Stephen on piano and me on flute (which I haven't played in years). The track was recorded live, then Greg's daughter Laura added the jingle bell track later, disregarding the cardinal rule that you always record the rhythm tracks first.

You can buy this single of Jingle Bells on iTunes, and believe it or not, people have.

I'm not sure it really has the same impact as it does as a bonus track on the CD, though. In fact, we just fulfilled a rush order for 10 copies of Starry, Starry Night for a couple that plans to give the CDs as gifts to each of their Thanksgiving guests this year. They specifically noted their love for the bonus track in their order. And I'm pretty sure they like the rest of it as well.

I haven't listened to the whole CD all the way through yet this year - I usually do each Christmas. It takes me back to that process, when we agonized over song order, debated whether or not to capitalize the song titles, draped Christmas lights over our shoulders for the inside photo and I wrote these words in the liner notes:

It is fitting that our first full length project be a collection of Christmas songs, because this is how we started singing together in the first place. And every Christmas, we are thankful that we can sing together again.

And while we're grateful to everyone who loves our music enough to buy even one track off iTunes, if you never hold the CD in your hands, you'll miss a lot.

Politics and Musicians

There have been heated discussions on all three music-related email discussion lists that I subscribe to over the past several weeks. On the Folk Alliance list, the FAR-West list and the House Concert Presenters Yahoo! Group the discussion has turned to whether or not - and when - it's appropriate for a musician to bring politics to the stage.

The really funny thing is that all three lists are primarily about FOLK music. Say it with me... DUH!

To be fair, the discussions have been very interesting. I agree that there is a point where entertainment stops and political rallying begins. Keeping focused and understanding your audience is not the same as censorship. But truth is truth, and at its core, I believe that's what makes a great song.

Rich Warren, king of WFMT's the Midnight Special and Folk Stage, wrote that he received an angry email last week after playing Chuck Brodsky's song He Came to Our Town (you can download it on iTunes). The listener essentially said he was tired of hearing our (current) president being called a liar.

Brodsky replied on the same list to point out the irony - according to Chuck it was Bill Clinton who originally inspired him to write that song.

Funny thing, truth.

More than words on a page

I love Twitter more than ever, now that I've moved beyond the "I'm having a tuna sandwich for lunch" tweets (although I still do that too) to engage in the online conversation. I'm appreciating finding great blog posts that interest me, and I've turned a complete stranger on to blip.fm which he's apparently grateful for. So that's cool.

Today Bob LeDrew, fellow flack/musician/house concert host from Canada, turned me on to Wordle. I now share Bob's irrational love for Wordle. As Bob says, there's just something about seeing your words in visual form.

These are the lyrics to our unreleased song "Love can Change the World," arranged in "tag cloug" style where the more frequently the word appears the larger it is represented in the cloud.

Being a visual artist as well as a songwriter, this is like system overload for me - but in a good way. Seeing the visual of the words heart, open, can and hear so much larger than the rest really confirms for me that we communicated what we needed to with this song. It overwhelms me all over again.

You Can listen to a very rough demo of Love Can Change the World on our SonicBids page under the audio tab.

You can learn more about Wordle and make your own at http://wordle.net

I wonder what kind of picture we'd see if we plugged one of George W's speaches into Wordle?

Nothing new under the sun

One of my favorite blogs, the New York Times songwriting blog Measure for Measure, is back. It went silent for a month and I was worried. Now I see they've added two new bloggers so I'm pretty sure I know what happened. It got to be too much for the initial bloggers to keep up the posts, so they recruited some fresh blood.

So we welcome a newcomer to the songwriter blogosphere, Jeffrey Lewis. His Rip-Off Artist post is about the realization that your song is really a bit more than "inspired by" another artist. We've all been there. I remember noodling around with a new melody, wrapping an idea aroudn it and being so excited... then I played it for Greg and he said "Mary Chapin Carpenter." And I said "oh crap."

But Jeffrey explores this idea a bit deeper as well. He writes:

All aspects of creativity are basically reconstituted bits and pieces of things we’ve seen, heard and experienced, finely or not-so-finely chopped and served in a form that hopefully blends the ingredients into something “new.” The ancient Greeks seemed to know this, expressed in their belief that the Muses of creativity were the daughters of Mnemosyne, Titan goddess of memory. Perhaps we would like to think that the thoughts that go into creating a new song are purely impressions from “real life,” but a melody does not suggest itself as much from the impression of the 6 train ride you took this morning as it does from a melody from another song. The same for chord progressions, song concepts, lyric sounds and patterns, song structures and everything else. Folk music is supposed to be a shared continuum after all, and as Louie Armstrong said, “All music is folk music, I ain’t never heard no horse sing a song.”

I think that's the beauty of original songwriting. The creativity is all about weaving experiences together into a new slice of time that never existed before.

I remember talking with my sister a few years about about writing songs. She's a classically trained soprano with a beautifuly interpretive voice, so she's no stranger to the importance of good material. She said she was impressed that I could come up with something NEW to say when there are already so many great songs that have already been written. Or something to that effect.

I thought a long time about that. How many songs are there that say I love you? How many that say please don't leave me? How about I'm unhappy since you left me? I want you back? I don't want you back? Do we need any more of those?

Yes, we do.

Because music touches people. I see it happen every time we perform. Someone in the room is in a place where the songs we sing have a healing or transforming power. I never know which song it will be, or who it will be. Many times that person will talk to me about it afterwards, and I'm always humbled by it. Sometimes I just see it in their eyes and for a moment there's a connection that is unmistakable.

Thats the power of music and the importance of an honest song - no matter where the bits and pieces came from.

What Shapes your Musical Influence?

At dinner last night, my friend and fellow blogger Larissa was telling us about a book called Your Brain on Music, in which author Daniel J. Levitin explains that we form our musical tastes during our high school years. I haven't read the book (though I think I will, it looks interesting) but I believe that's true.

This doesn't mean you're stuck forever in the style of your youth, but it does mean that you gravitate toward the musical influences of that era in terms of harmony, instrumentation, and vocal arrangement. People tend to like new music created by people who listened to the same types of music they did when they were young.

Greg cringes when people say that our music reminds them of Crosby, Stills & Nash, because he feels that its pretentious to compare ourselves to them. But its not a one-to-one comparison. People aren't saying we sound exactly like CSN or that we're just as good. What they're saying is that they can hear the influence in the vocal arrangements that he creates. And that's a direct result of Greg listening to lots of Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Burrito Brothers, Linda Ronstadt, etc. through the 60s and 70s.

And I believe that's why people who are looking for new music, who grew up with the same influences, appreciate what we do. Its contemporary, but with a familiar flavor.

On the other hand, I'm not sure where my influence comes in. I was listening to Maynard Ferguson and Stan Kenton in high school, and REO Speedwagon and Styx in college.

What were you listening to then, and now? Where do you discover new music?

Creativity and the Day Job

I've been thinking a lot lately about creativity. And validity. And whether or not I can be a professional musician while I am still a professional PR consultant. Its the "day job" stigma that's had me confused.

Here's where I am in my thought process. As ususal, there are some stories to tell.

Sara is a ceramicist in West Linn, Oregon. She is also a graphic designer. When she lived in Santa Clara, I sculpted in her studio every Friday morning. She moved to Oregon two years ago, and now I don't sculpt anymore. We spent a few days together last month when Greg and I were on tour, and she said something that I can't shake. She said as long as she can make her living as a graphic designer, and not a ceramicist, she is freer to create her art.

It sounds so obvious, and it makes perfect sense when Sara says it because I see her first as an artist, and second as someone who I call when I need a brochure or a poster - like tomorrow.

But I've been caught up in not feeling worthy because I'm not a starving musician. I'm a successful public relations consultant living in Silicon Valley.

My mom is a visual artist - she draws portraits with depth and feeling, paints innovative and inspiring abstract watercolors and creates amazing hand made paper pieces. Although many pieces have hung in galleries - and certainly some have been sold - selling her art has never been her focus. But that doesn't mean she is an amateur, or that her artwork doesn't have value. She's taught me a lot about not devaluing your art.

Being in my parents' house, surrounded by her paintings, is to be enveloped by a beauty and peacefulness that I don't find anywhere else. And although her primary medium is visual and mine is music, she is a true artistic inspiration for me. We're headed down for a visit this weekend, and I can't wait. I need that peacefulness.

So here's where I think I am with this... Sara can sculpt from her heart. My mother can paint and create paper from her heart. I can write songs from my heart.

It doesn't mean we are amateurs or that our art is inferior... just that we are creatively free from the need to make a living from our art. And that's very important work.