As a lot of you know, I've been thinking about the best ways to keep doing my own music in the current bizarre state of the music biz, where between the recession and downloading CD sales have dwindled down to nothing and the indie music community has been scattered into the tiniest fragments....and also now being a full-time musician, mostly working on other peoples' music, putting time into my own music can take money out of my own pocket.
I've been luckier than most -- I have a little following and three of my albums on Karma Frog actually turned a profit -- but it became obvious earlier this year that I couldn't keep doing things the way I had for ten years.
Part of what drove me to back-burner my own music was in 2009 I released an album called GO WEST. It was a 23-track double album with a continuous theme running through it. I thought then, and I still think, that it's the best work I've ever done, and perhaps will ever do. But it also became obvious that the album as a whole was just too much for a lot of people to take in -- if you weren't ready to dig in for the long haul, or accept the diversity of styles on it, it didn't seem to work for a lot of people. The ones that did get into it were the ones that had the time and patience to listen to it from beginning to end.
That said, even if the album as a whole was too big a pill to swallow, it contains some of the very best individual songs I ever wrote....a lot of them. And to me there's not much point in continuing to write songs if there's plenty of your best work that most people have never really heard.
So after a lot of thought, I've decided that in 2011 I have no plans to do any new writing other than what I'm asked to do for custom songs, the Standells, or whatever. What I want to do instead is refocus attention on the GO WEST album. I was so disheartened year ago by various things that I basically couldn't face promoting it, and I instead put out the HELLO CLEVELAND record as a white flag and pretty much gave up. I basically chickened out on GO WEST, and left the baby to drown. I've decided I can't move forward without first reaching back and fishing it out of the water.
Instead of beating my brains loose on the road, what I plan to do for GO WEST is put out a series of videos, highlighting the best songs on the album, one by one. What I hope is that people that might not have been able to get into the whole double album idea can get to know the album on a song-by-song basis and appreciate what's there. Since the album has a loose storyline, I think the songs will lend themselves really well to visuals.
The second video for the album, and the first in over a year, will debut later today. I am REALLY proud of how it came out. I hope you'll take the time to give it a look, and if you like it, to pass it on. And I hope over time, more and more of you will get to know GO WEST.
Oh...almost forgot. To encourage people to pick up this CD, I've dropped the price on my website for GO WEST to $9.99...and that includes postage. To order, just go to www.adammarsland.com/store.html. Amazon has it, too, and they have used copies going for pretty cheap.
I've got some down time this month and I'm hoping to be able to pick up a number of other threads I dropped a few months ago, including this blog and the bedroom session videos. I've just been so friggin' busy that until now I haven't had the spare creative energy to do this stuff. Thanks all for your patience.
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