Saturday, October 18, 2003


Working all day and all night right now. Non-stop. It is seven o'clock at night on a Saturday and I am in the office. Since early morning. On the phone with radio guys all day. Reception to the sleep with you album is great. People dig it. This is insane. But exciting. of course the critics are killing me, just totally trashing me...

Talking to Madelyn on the phone today about the music biz. And we are now just at the edge of being knee deep in another promotions blitz for the sleep with you album. you get bombarded by advisors and consultants telling you what you need to do and how to do every little thing. Everyone has their theory. Every company their own formula. This butt plug out in California who owns this referring company telling me “oh Fishy look you have to be touring in order to... that's the only way.....” and others are like “Oh you have to sell like a hundred thousand records... and others are like Oh you have to fill your albums with all hits and not do any artistic music until after your really old and famous.. And of course everyone has their opinion about how a band should dress, what a band should look like, what a band should say and not say, etc etc. I'm totally serious and you really do hear everything you can imagine... just heard last week that “it takes ten to twelve million to break a band these days.” Or “...look you guys, that's artistic type of stuff, but you have to cater more towards what the people want.... be more commercial....” its funny because for every example they show you there's ten examples showing something entirely different. Just like life. I don't believe in formulas. Unless you want to come across formulaic of course. Then by all means... 

So anyway I just bought this book ‘pandering’ by Heidi Fleiss. And its an absolute visual and artistic feast. Just totally throwing it all out there. Reminds you to just say fuck it to the business of it all and just keep doing art for its own sake. Hard to stay inspired, truly just in the flow of inspiration artistically when you are always having to work at the business of your art as well. I envy the guys for this. They don't pay as much attention to the business. Leaving it all to me. this is one of the only drawbacks of going indie and taking an active interest in the biz of your art, is that you have to kind of slingshot back and forth between being a totally catered to, disconnected and out of it artist, and being a really with it totally there business type. Hard to balance sometimes. They seem so diametrically opposed. Came back to the office and looked at all these music magazines with all the bands posing on the cover and I thought, oh my God what were we thinking? We just have to keep doing our thing and just really making sure that more than anything else we are totally fulfilled and satisfied as artists. Stop listening to all these people. stop worrying about what other bands are doing, or what's cool or not cool. The rest will fall into place. 

Current read: Pandering by Heidi Fleiss

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