Be a music locaphile!

Unless you've been on Mars for the last decade, not only have you heard the term "locavore" but it's probably become a well-worn term in your vocabulary. Eating locally grown, locally prepared food makes a ton of sense. You'll keep more money circulating in your local community, chew up less fossil fuel in the process and make life better for those in your immediate vicinity. Since food is an essential ingredient of life, it's easy to see how making changes in how you obtain it could have a big environmental impact. But I'm a music guy, why am I going on an on about eating local food?

Over the last three years, I've developed the opinion that it's not just food that should be local. The concept applies in general: just about anything you can acquire locally has greater positive impact on the community where you live than the same thing imported from elsewhere in world. I've reached the conclusion that entertainment is another excellent opportunity to channel money and good will into your local community. If you go to a local movie theater and pay to see a movie, much of that money makes it's way out of your town, out of your state and into the coffers of big entertainment companies many miles away. The candy, soda and snacks you buy during the show also feed big business ventures around the country. Sure, some of your ticket purchase supports the local movie theater and its employees but perhaps we can do better.

Admittedly, movies are a challenging example. It takes a lot of money and time to make the high quality movies that we've gotten used to watching. There hasn't yet been an easy way for a local filmmaker to generate a movie and make a living solely based on local distribution. But music is different...

Despite trends in the last 50-75 years, music can be performed and experienced on the spot. Sure, it's great to have 1000s of songs in the palm of your hand but, honestly, that's no substitute for seeing a great performer in person. And what's even more satisfying is being an avid fan for local bands, watching them mature from a first-line opening act to a guaranteed headliner. As a fan, your emotional investment in local performers will pay back in spades. Unlike the rest of the country, you can typically count on seeing your favorite band often, in a more intimate setting, and you can share those experiences with good friends and family.

If you become a loyal fan for local acts, the money you spend for tickets will at least partially make its way into the pockets of your favorite performers. Even the money you spend on snacks and drinks will help support the local venues, keeping them in business so they can continue to bring you great shows. If you make a habit of buying music directly from your local bands, they have a much better chance of making a living and putting out more music to share with you. And because we're talking about local artists, if they stay in business, you will keep having the opportunity to see them.

That's not the whole scoop either. If you support local acts, they will improve over time, polishing their musical and performance skills. They will move up the rungs to eventually become headliners at the local level, opening the door for another generation of local supporting acts. And eventually, some of them will gain fame outside your local community, drawing attention from outside. Once that happens, they are very likely to start bringing money into your community from the outside. When they play in your town, folks from nearby communities will travel to see them and spend money in your town. When they play elsewhere, the word will spread to other communities, helping to make your town a more attractive stopping point for major touring acts.

So, I'm asking every one of you to think hard about how you spend your entertainment time and dollars. An audiophile is someone that loves high quality audio, a connoisseur of the audio experience. With that in mind, I'm suggesting that you become a "music locaphile", someone that not only loves music but is devoted to supporting music that's written, practiced, performed and distributed locally. By putting more of your entertainment time and money into your local music scene you'll improve the community financially, emotionally and creatively.

So, what's stopping you? Get out there and discover the musicians and bands in your own town and contribute to their success. In the process, you'll contribute to your own success.

I'm back

I turned it off. Somewhere along the way, I shut it down. Not all at once but bit by bit. It hit me today, decades after the transition was complete. I haven't written a single solitary phrase, let alone a full set of lyrics for years and years and years.

It wasn't always that way. Early on, I wrote words and music. Even after beginning my songwriting collaboration with Steve, I wrote songs on my own and even co-wrote lyrics for "Same Time Next Week". I have an entire folder full of handwritten, signed lyrics by yours truly. But somehow, not long after filling that up, I encased what was left of my lyrical creativity in concrete and walked away.

It was a decision steeped in pragmatism, contentedness and distraction. Steve and I had a workflow: I wrote music, usually a section or two of a song, then he wrote words and made suggestions about missing parts. We generated a lot of songs that way and it was a system that worked. I was content to focus on guitar, my first love, and was willing to let the words fall by the wayside. Life was good in Silicon Valley in those days, lots of jobs, tons of work, and sense that it would go on forever. There really wasn't any strong motivation to express emotions; there just wasn't a reason.

Then the realization came over me, all at once. I've forgotten how to dig deep down and express what I'm feeling in the words of a song. My own song. Life isn't as squeaky clean as it once appeared. I never imagined we'd spend nearly a decade trying to become parents. I never imagined I'd reach a point where my hometown wasn't home anymore. I never imagined I'd go through 4 jobs in 3 years. Maybe it was my own disbelief that stood in the way. I just never realized that the impact of life had never shown its face in my music.

And that needs to change. I am unlikely to become the next Bob Dylan or Paul Simon or even Pete Townshend. Even so, I need to get back to channeling who I am, not just into music, but into words. Otherwise, I am holding back who I am, where I came from and what I've been through. I need to express the things that frustrate, anger, terrify and invigorate me. What's inside needs to come out and I need to get back to who I am, despite knowing that I can't simply return to who I was.

Codename "Tribute" - The Delivery (part 2)

Last time, I talked about how "Tribute" came together and how we went from over a 100 potential songs, down to the 9 that made the album. Today, I want to fill in some of the details about the song treatments and the recording process.

As I look back on the process, recalling that it took many months to kick into gear, it still came together more rapidly than most of my music projects. It helped that the songs were already written. In a way, I think was part of the magic; it allowed us to focus all of our energy on picking the songs and then arranging them so that they lived up to our "Heavy" expectations. It was also a very satisfying recording process. All of the drums and rhythm guitars were tracked at once, plus some scratch bass parts. Many of the songs were arranged on the fly, as a band, although "I Think We're Alone Now" was one that I arranged on my own and Steve S. brought in the complete treatment for "Generals & Majors". Oddly enough, that phase of tracking went by so quickly (3-4 sessions over a month or two) that we were then left with my usual question, "What the heck are we going to do about vocals?"

Well, that's where Scott Adler, another comrade from Apple, stepped in. Steve R. and I had worked with Scott and his a cappella group, "One of Each" on a holiday spoof of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" called "Christmas Rhapsody". Scott did all the low parts in the vocal arrangements and had never sung even as much as one phrase of heavy rock or metal in his life. I think all of us were initially imagining someone with a higher range, a more stereotypical metal voice, but Steve R. and I had such respect for the way Scott had handled the vocal arrangements and tracking on "Bohemian Rhapsody" that we knew it was worth a shot. Looking back, I can't imagine it playing out any other way. Scott's voice and his approach are unique and helped pull together the songs, giving them cohesiveness as an album. For a guy who hadn't done any metal before, he added a dark, scary component to the arrangements and really helped define the sound.

Somewhere along the line, we finally dropped the "Tribute" moniker in favor of "Danger, Ltd." It took me a good part of another year to get all the tracks mixed, mastered and released. Still, something about the way the project played out has left me with mostly good memories. Unlike some other projects, overall this one went from start to completion fairly quickly, at least quickly enough that it didn't feel like it was dragging. I also like the way the band, the album and the songs all have a very clear vision and stuck with it throughout. I think that vision is strong enough that it could carry over to another album or two. Really, it's a question of logistics now that we're spread out across the country one on the East coast, three in the Bay Area and yours truly in Bozeman, Montana. But with the right motivation, namely a collection of great songs to tribute, you never know.

Got any songs you'd like to hear Danger, Ltd. cover?

Codename "Tribute" - The Motivation (part 1)

At this point in 2012, the band has been called Danger, Ltd. for longer than it carried the "Tribute" codename. Even so, there was quite a long period where we simply referred to it as "Tribute". That codename was a direct reflection of the band's mission, which grew and evolved over quite a few years before a single note was played.

For many years, covering almost the entire span of my collaboration with Steve Rosenthal, we often found ourselves discussing the difference between the typical cover song performance and the real works of art. I think that our first example of masterful cover versions was Van Halen. There was something special about the way they covered a song with such conviction. They infused cover songs with so much of the Van Halen flavor that they really feel like they belong right next to their original songs. We also rambled on about Nazareth's cover of "Love Hurts", Cheap Trick's version of "Ain't That A Shame" and The Lemonhead's treatment of "Mrs. Robinson". We've all been to parties where there's a cover band; they play for hours and every song sounds like a weak knockoff of the original, without any real life or special treatment. Steve and I were always fascinated by the bands that could grab a cover song by the throat and take full control of it, making it their own song in the process.

Sometime in the 2000s, my friend Steve Sicular and I got together to talk about guitar, amps and gear in general. We'd always said, "We should play together sometime." We spent quite awhile in that mode. At one point considered starting a software venture related to music publicity but that never quite gained solid traction.

Meanwhile I'd bounced around a bit between software development jobs, eventually finding a position at Apple, working closely with my friend, Mike Hay. Though we regularly talked "tech" over lunch or coffee, the conversations often meandered until they landed on the idea of a concept band. Initially, I was interested in a band that covers relatively unknown but great songs, sort of acting as a "tribute" to great songwriting, with a nod toward under appreciated composers and performers. I don't really remember how we transitioned from talk to action but, at some point, the two Steves, Mike and I ended up getting together in my Redwood City studio, polishing up the "Tribute" idea.

Pretty quickly, it was clear that I was in the minority on the under appreciated artists concept. The overall consensus was leaning toward picking reasonably well known songs, so that listeners would have some familiarity with the material. We put together a Wiki as a place to collect song ideas and developed a points scheme that allowed us to all vote for the songs, with point totals clearly distinguishing the ones that stood out from the rest. I'm pretty sure we had almost 100 songs nominated, maybe 20 that got voted up and when it was all said and done, 9 songs made it to the album.

In my next blog posting I will talk about how we went from a list of 9 songs to a finished album release. While you're waiting, how about sharing your thoughts on some great (and interesting) cover versions of songs...

Pandora's pitfalls

Recently, while digging through the business news, I ran into this article about Pandora's earnings shortfall: Pandora's earnings miss. Those of you that caught my previous articles about digital streaming's unfulfilled promise and digital vs. analog search know that I have been disappointed in the past by Pandora and other streaming services. The article about Pandora's earnings announcement inspired me to dig deeper into Pandora and whether my criticism is justified.

First, a disclaimer: I submitted Scattershock's album, Wrong Train, to Pandora shortly after we completed it. Within a short period of time we received a rejection letter, with the message, "Thank you for your submission to Pandora's Music Genome Project. We wish we could say otherwise, but we have decided that this submission does not fit our collection needs at this time."

Having attended UCSF for my graduate studies and received a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Pandora's use of the term "Music Genome Project" has often nagged at me. The concept of mapping musical forms by a defined set of criteria and using that mapping to establish relationships between artists is intriguing. What bugged me, though, was that unlike the Human Genome Project, Pandora's project is mostly subjective, based on qualitative assessment of each artist's songs. Here I have excerpted the goals of the Human Genome Project (courtesy of the HGP website):

 (The Human Genome Project's) goals were to

• identify all the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA
• determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA
• store this information in databases
• improve tools for data analysis
• transfer related technologies to the private sector
• address the ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) that may arise from the project

 Those goals are clear and are all-encompassing. The first bullet point clearly states the goal includes ALL of the genes in human DNA. Imagine if the HGP had instead opted to catalog only some of the genes? Would the resulting data be anywhere near as scientifically useful? Absolutely not. Partial data in this case would lead to skewed conclusions and lack of confidence.

So then, what does that mean for Pandora? Well, they've opted to call their efforts the "Music Genome Project", with an obvious tip of the hat to the HGP. But, we know that they chose to leave Scattershock out of their database. And that's where the article about Pandora's earnings left me with this nagging question. Is there a reason that Pandora isn't simply blowing everyone's mind and making money hand over foot? There are clearly some fundamental business reasons why the streaming business may not prove successful for anyone. I'm not here to dig deeply into that question. However, I am interested in the question, "Why are some digital music services more valuable to me than others."

As a DJ (at KGLT) and a guy with a huge appetite for new, heavy music, I'm looking for ways to discover the wide variety of heavy bands all around the world. Pandora seems like it'd be a powerful tool for that but I wanted to understand how helpful it really is. I decided to assess a number of the music content and streaming services to see which ones fared best.

I decided to ask a fairly simple question, then collect appropriate data and analyze the results. I took the playlists from two of my recent KGLT shows and identified all the bands that I'd played. Then I asked, "How many of these bands could I have discovered using each of the music services I surveyed?". I have included the raw data below, but here's the executive summary:

Total Bands	Pandora	iTunes	Last.fm	Spotify	MOG
74	56	74	74	64	72
	76%	100%	100%	97%	97%

And that clearly demonstrates why Pandora has never worked well for me and Last.fm has. If I used Pandora, I wouldn't be able to play one quarter of the bands I play on my show. This data is for only two of my shows, meaning that over the last 8 months that could amount to over 100 bands simply left out of my show. Pandora would sweep them under the rug and pretend they just don't exist. You say, "David, but those bands are all obscure ones like Scattershock, no one knows about them and no one cares." If you look at the detailed data, you will see that Pandora's oversight includes Amaranthe, Bloodbound, Down From Up and The Slot. Sorry folks, these are serious bands with multiple album releases and videos. You might think that these bands somehow haven't submitted their works to Pandora, and that's a valid point. Maybe all these bands are boycotting Pandora for some reason. That's absolutely possible but, that just goes back to my point.

Pandora's collection is biased. It omits major name bands, many of whom have won music awards around the world. It also omits small, unestablished bands, some of whom will eventually become household words. And if you want to be an early adopter of such acts, you are much better off with any of the other services I surveyed, and especially iTunes and Last.fm.

So, tell me, what's your favorite music service? And, if any of you have invested in Pandora, what are your thoughts about your investment and the bands that aren't available via the service?

Streaming Service Comparison - the raw data...