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.