Tomorrow, I will put Nothing of Consequence (my new collection of tunes) up on the site and provide appropriate links. I might put it up on the iTunes store or on emusic, but for now it will be free to anyone who drops by and clicks the link. I’m excited to see if I can get 100 people to download the album. That would be really cool. To my mind, it’s like having a recital with 100 people in the audience and that’s the way I’m approaching music right now.

The era of the rock star is fading (more slowly than it ought) and taking with it a pile of assumptions. Platinum albums that lead to mansions and fast cars are not what the future has to offer a dreaming musician. What artists have to look forward to now has perhaps more in common with 200 years ago than 50 which, incidentally, I think is what we’re all looking at in every aspect of our lives. But the value of music and art is pushing ahead into a place where everything revolves around real connections.

I would never pretend to guess what the almighty market will do with music. People will still get paid to play and to write. There will be commercials for years to come that will need hip and edgy sounds from the almost underground to advertise bad cologne and cars. There will always be posers who need to listen to the most obscure pieces they can find. There will always be artistic adventurers who genuinely crave and seek out the new. And in the absence of those, there will always be family and friends (hi mom!) which is sort of the point of creative endeavors the more I think about it. Community. Family.

My son is entering a creative phase. He’s two. The other day, he wrote his name. There’s really no way to describe how that feels. To see your child do something so amazing is visceral and powerful. I want to hear the songs he sings. See the towers he builds. Trace the lines of his crayons when he says it’s time to “color-color paper!” I have the same sense when it comes to my brother and my friends. I want to see what they’re doing. I want to read the pages of their manuscripts and look at their photographs and paintings. In them there are reflections of times and places that have meaning for me and I get to see them through another lens. The work offers me something and I take it.

None of that, mind you, recognizes money or professional status. T.S. Eliot was a banker when he wrote The Waste Land. Many great composers and artists created their ouvre without so much as a dime coming back for their efforts. The reason I ignore these things is that they have very little to do with the quality of the work or what draws me to it. Things like this certainly don’t compel me to create.

This is a long way of saying that no one needs publishers or middlemen anymore and no one really needs to be creating full time for it to have meaning. The Internet makes sharing a story or song as easy as dropping some extra tomatoes on someone’s porch when they’re not home. It’s easy for art to be by and for a community and if that sounds like a lot of hippie-free-love crap, it almost is. I say almost because the sentiment is over the top most of the time. But when I read a cool piece of fiction written by a friend or download some tunes by someone I know who lives too far away for me to jam with, it’s awesomely true. I see more and more of my moonlighting artist friends getting that point. It’s exciting. The excuses for skipping out on one’s creative life are fewer by the day.

So in the spirit of saluting anyone who buys notebooks for scribbling in over an outrageously priced coffee or sets up a blog to push a story like a crazy street preacher or sits in the park tentatively adding to the sounds of the city with a quiet guitar I will put my music out there too. As my uncle always said, more fools, more fun.

New tunes are being crafted this week. I have 80-90% of a leading track and it’s pleasing. There are some things that need to be filled in, but I need some distance from it. I’ll be starting on a new track tonight. The collection is aiming for something that I’ve wanted to do for some time but never got around to starting. It’s more ambient with lots of electric guitar so beaten and abused that it barely sounds like a stringed instrument much less a guitar. Frippertronics gone horribly, horribly wrong. Or right.

The trick I’m using this time is to start with titles for songs and work backward. I’ve always left titling pieces for the end because I hate tacking a name to musical units. Movements, songs, pieces, whatever. Op. 44 would be fine with me to be perfectly honest. But by starting with the titles, I have almost a theme with which to start each session and that provides a certain kind of motivation.

I took a hint from a site I used to read and can’t recall now that mentioned looking to the titles of books, chapters or poems for song ideas. On a lark, I dove into my database of books (yeah, I database my personal library) and dug out some fragments of titles. It’s an ecclectic mix of names and topics but there’s a flow there that I have divined for myself and there is some small excitement in an experiement like this.

So I’m making an album that I have wanted to make and using a technique that is yet another in a long series of new to me mindhacks. That should be enough to see me through.

Unlike previous endeavors I am going to release this as a unit so I won’t be putting up sketches of material for this collection. I want it to be a larger piece with interrelated movements. There’s this sense that once I have shared something it’s done and I don’t want that. It could seriously get in the way of the overall form and I’m just not cool with that. That doens’t mean I won’t be posting music! I still have things that I’m working out that might never make it to the full on production stage. It’s absolutely necessary for anyone to have feedback so there will still be stuff here. And soon!