Missing that Magic...

So another Friday another show and I'm starting to feel like something is a tad out of place. Now don't get me wrong the show went well, I even stuck in a new song and the audience that was there enjoyed things, thing is though apart from the three friends that made it down the rest of the audience was just the rest of the bands that were playing. This seems to be about the size of crowd I can seem to expect doing gigs at the moment and I can't help but feel that I'm somehow missing some piece of the puzzle.

I'm fairly certain that I'm not a horrific musician, the odd bits of feedback I get are pretty positive, and the people who are giving it don't seem like the types to be just patting me on the head and saying it because they don't think I could handle being told I was awful. The demo I made I think was pretty ok for a first go, that I did for free in my spare room in an afternoon, I wasn't expecting it to go into the top forty or anything but I at least enjoy listening to it. Hell even this blog gets a small amount of regular interest even though it's mostly full of nonsense and waffle. But despite these things I feel like I'm dragging along Red Rag Front against it's will and that people really just aren't interested at all.

Now people not wanting to listen to me isn't much of a problem, I wont ever stop playing music but I feel like maybe there is a better outlet than begging my way onto a stage that no one really wants me to be on. It seems to me like there is a fundamental piece of the puzzle I have overlooked, and I have a feeling that piece is networking. I don't go to a lot of gigs and shows and I haven't made friends with any promoters, asides from the shows I played. I had thought this would be enough to generate some interest in the band, and then having the EP up for people to listen would help cement some interest but it just hasn't worked out that way.

Is this just what all new start ups go through? Certainly doesn't seem that way from the friends I have but maybe the real missing piece of the puzzle is that they are exceptional and I'm not.

Becoming a stat junkie and getting eclectic!

So the demo has been kicking around for a week or so now and to be honest I am ever so slightly underwhelmed at the reception it got. My new obsession has become the stat recorder on Bandcamp, and what I see doesn't set me on fire! The issue with being able to see exactly who is listening to your sounds means you can see just how little people have listened to it too. Not that I'm saying that literally no one has checked it out, but the amount of listens it got kind of blew. For a comparison I will use regular Acoustic Pop Punker name check Demon Smiles. By looking at their Bandpage section on FB and their Soundcloud account I can see that just on these two accounts they have had around a thousand listens over all the tracks. To put this into context I would have to to take my entire amount of listens, times it by four just to get the amount they have on one song. Maybe I just need to accept that acoustic pop punk is too niche a musical market for people to check it out, or maybe I need to accept that the EP wasn't as great to everyone else as it is in my head. Either way I am glued to those darned stat pages like an alcoholic locked in a Jack Daniels distribution warehouse!

Having a poor to mediocre reception to the EP hasn't stopped me playing some pretty awesome shows though. Last Friday saw me take part in The Songwriter Sessions, a jam night put on by The Jam Club, a great little enterprise hosting these types of evenings a couple times a month. The tag line in the flyer promises the best singer songwriters in London, and although I wouldn't say everyone (including myself) could live up to that lofty description there were certainly several who would wear that badge pretty well.

Notable acts in the evening were a girl (whose name escapes me, sorry awesome girl) who was frankly incredible. I have only heard one other female acoustic artist that has impressed me so much and she played my wedding song!! Also in the category of most original/super mega awesome was an appearance of the front man of Jesus Hooligan, who played us a song by beating the snot out of a stool with a massive chain, whilst growling out the coolest viking core lyrics I've heard in a while. But the topper of all was the final act on (sadly not me, I faded into relative obscurity even whilst pumping out my greatest hits) was MC JC, a piano playing rapper. But not just a piano playing rapper, one who was pretty much a better piano player that anyone else I know in real life. Not just that but the kid was BLIND!!!! yep that's right, after all of us got up and sweated our way through 3 - 5 songs this blind kid in a hoodie schooled the goddamned hell out of every person there on what being a musician is all about.

Even though my own stamp on the evening didn't make waves like some others I was truly grateful to have been a part of such a great evening and it also reminded me of why I started all of this in the first place. Not to get the most listens or the biggest turnouts or the coolest shows. But to give myself a chance to experience music in a way that I could never without being a part of it.

Next on my list of things to do in the coming months is play at least one actual punk show and also to start working on ten songs I'm going to put into an album. So far I have thought of a witty title/cover and decided it'll include at least some of that long talked about collaboration with Demon Smiles but that's about as far as I have gotten.

Overambitious Expectations

Have you listened to the the River Jumpers debut EP? If not I'll wait.......

Amazing right? yeah I know, it was on constant repeat for most of my 2012 and as first recordings go I'd say it's round about perfect. It was largely because of this that I decided that I would get back in the game and fire up my strumming arm again. In the back of my mind I thought "goddamn yeah I'm gonna have a Debut EP that sounds as good as this.

Then at some point last year whilst getting very heavily into acoustic punk written by guys who used to be in more established bands I came across a split album called Acoustic featuring Tony Sly and Joey Cape. It pretty much blew my mind with regards to what I expect of an acoustic album and is now easily one of my favourite records of all time.

So with these two points in mind I kind of got it into my head that in order to be in any way successful I needed to make this super epic perfect production incredible demo otherwise it wouldn't count. In my mind this equated to having a tonne of junk going on in every track. I scoured my shoddy memory for everything I could do musically and ended up with bass, keyboard, violin, drum, harmony and in some cases ukulele parts for every track on the EP. Not to mention I decided I wanted a clip from a Louis Theroux show to be included on a track just like the Ataris are wont to do. So in my head I was totally set to make the acoustic punk recording of the century.

Now a few reality checks came into play once I started piecing this epic undertaking together, namely that I can't play the drums for toffee. Also not in my favour was that I have never played the violin and it turned out that just buying one and expecting to pick it up with no instruction straight away was a stupid idea (also the violin I bought had no strings). The last issue was that I am also terrible with harmonies so slowly but surely the amount of junk on each track started to diminish.

One of the last things to make me realise I was being a bit ridiculous was when Demon Smiles unleashed their demo on the world. It's raw and beautiful and doesn't give a good god damn about whether it's highly produced. It's sounds exactly as it should and sounds like it was produced on pure excitement and love of what the guys were doing. That really helped pull my head out of the clouds and again I cut back on extra airy fairy junk on my own offering.

Last came when actually recording the thing. Whilst listening back to the base instrumentation it finally struck me that, just like DS demo, it sounded just how it needed to without anything too over the top going on. I even cut out a whole song just because it didn't seem to flow on the day. What came out of that effort was something that worked on just the right level for who I am as an artist and I'm pretty proud of having had that revelation before I started filling up peoples ears with superfluous junk added just for the sake of it!!

Anyway keep your ears peeled for the second Red Rag demo (the first was a cassette Tazz and I created for someones Birthday and is currently lost to the mists of time) it'll be up on every concievable online media outlet soon.