Ooh Shiny!

I don't think I'm alone (and welcome back to the blog, btw) in wanting to have a certain amount of positive social energy in my life...people that I think are really attractive, sexy, who inspire me, give me new perspectives, who I relate to, make me feel good about my place in the world, and make me feel a little less alone. I think we all want and need that.

For me, I always look for people that are a little out of the box. Nothing against people with normal 9-to-5 lives, it's just not what stimulates me.

Lately though, I've started to draw a line in my head between people that really have a degree of depth and character that underlies the surface attractiveness, and people that are just very good at being attractive. For lack of a better word, I've been calling these latter folks "shiny" people.

This is kind of an abstract concept, so let me try out a pretty obvious example. You're at a party. There's a beautiful girl there. She's put together well, smiles, and is friendly. You have a nice conversation. Maybe you exchange phone numbers and go out another time. But it becomes obvious after awhile that though the person is attractive on the surface, to misparaphrase Gertrude Stein, there's really no "there" there. There wasn't really anything in between the two of you in the way of a connection, and in the end, the person winds up being a waste of time and resources (particularly if you picked up the tab for dinner, you cheap bastard).

The thing is, I find that if you think it through -- or at least if I do -- take a step back from the physical reality in front of you and draw in the whole of the person, you can often take a good guess at who is really going to be worth pursuing a relationship (I mean that in the elastic way, including friendships and things like that) with, and who isn't. Or, if you can't, that at least it's really good to withhold yourself a little bit until you get a better sense of the person.

This has been a really great thing to figure out for me. It's always so great for me to meet people that I think are intriguing that it's easy to go overboard and ascribe things to them that aren't really there. That's not fair to me, and it's also not fair to them...it doesn't allow people to be who they are and be appreciate for that. And you also wind up overlooking people that aren't as glittery on the surface, but have a lot more to offer as friends.

2011: GO WEST again

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.

Testing 1, 2, 3...

Almost ready to start this thing back up again...just give me...a few more hours...spare time....

Stand by, I have some good stories to tell...

Whitey go home

My dad -- a cantankerous small business owner who was an old-school conservative, which means back in the day when you could be thoughtful and intellectual without being excommunicated for "not being conservative enough" -- always had a great take on the immigration debate.

He used to say, "my opinion is, let everybody into the country that wants to work...and deport everybody that doesn't." He then went on to extoll the virtues of immigrants as laborers and the overall laziness of native-born Americans.

There's much in that viewpoint to piss off right and left alike, but even though I don't endorse his opinion, I sure find it refreshing. Because it's so...intellectually honest, and personally arrived at. Imagine that. I certainly can't imagine my dad, if he were alive, showing up at a Tea Party meeting and finding much of an audience for that sentiment.

I miss my dad's conservatism. But then, he grew up in a time when taking responsibility didn't just stop at the end of your driveway, and when people didn't have thousands of media outlets telling them exactly what to think.

Daily Snark

Ever post a comment that sums up how you feel so well, that you want to mark it down for future reference?

Here's mine for the day:

To arrive at a fact, you have to attempt to weigh information objectively and fairly. This is a concept that's now completely devalued and ridiculed in our society, which I find absolutely insane.

But I suppose it's BIASED of me to say so.

It's Hard Work

After another supremely irritating encounter with a few dittoheads on Facebook, I've decided I'd like to completely reorder the political divide in this country to what it truly is.

Instead of having a battle against liberals vs. conservatives, I propose a debate against:

1. People who realize the world is a complicated place, with many competing interests and ideas, and that actually solving problems requires real thought, commitment, and decisions that are always going to make some people unhappy; and

2. People who want to piss and moan, and offer simplistic solutions to everything, if they offer solutions at all. (One of the people I went off on actually said something like, "so I suppose if we all raised taxes and regulated everything, it would solve the job problem". I told the guy, accurately, that if I was writing a parody of someone with his viewpoint, that's about what I would have said)

This is what drives me absolutely, completely batshit insane about this country and I will come out and say it: why I still support Obama, for all the mistakes he's made (and I think the biggest one is not communicating better). Because Obama falls in to the #1 category. And from what I can see, all of his most vehement detractors fall into the #2 category. When you actually sit down and look through the situation in the country fairly, and look at how we got here without idealogical bias, it's a lot harder to beat up on the guy. In fact, from what I can see, what he has done has been...pretty much exactly what he said he would do, and he won the last election handily. Funny in all this "discussion" of socialism how no one ever talks about that. It seems like that's sorta relevant to me.

And until someone else steps up that really seems like he or she wants to understand the problems facing the country and not just yell and wave articles of faith at them that, in the real world haven't worked out so simply or easily (lower taxes! Freedom! Rah! OK, how low is low enough? What about ballooning the deficit? What about Clinton's tax hike that was partly responsible for balancing the budget? What about the fact that the Laffer curve has not worked out in actual practice? Reaction: Blank stare, or blanket denial. Because, ahem...low taxes!!! Freedom!!!!), that's the way it's going to stay. Because I don't see anybody stepping up on the horizon to replace Obama that I can take seriously. In fact, the mainstream now is people saying things that 10 years ago would have sounded certifiably insane and/or seditious. It's people who want to sit down and think things through that are the big joke. Or worse, people like me are now the ENEMIES OF THE COUNTRY. Right? RIGHT?

What I find absolutely maddening about the state of politics these days is that people don't even have real discussion anymore. The folks I argued with this morning just threw up straw men and argued with THEM. For my part, I pointed out that they obviously hadn't exposed themselves to any sources of information that didn't tell them what they already wanted to hear.

There are, I hope, millions of people in America that are like me: basically moderate, and fed up with the fact that doing things, you know, rationally and pragmatically, doing things not because we believe in them real hard but because they verifiably WORK in practice, is out of fashion now and extremists are taking up all the air. I tend to take the liberal position in arguments just because most of the time, people are so full up with talking points from Fox News that they've never even heard anything else, but really what I want to hear is the ideas bump up against each other and let the best one win. I started seeking out alternate news sources years ago not because I wanted to be convinced I was right, but because I wanted to hear the debate, and I realized I was being prevented from hearing it!

Nearly everything I saw or heard in the media where two sides squared off against each other was carefully choreographed so that I basically learned...nothing. To actually figure out what was going on, I had to dig very hard to find real logical, rational point-counterpoint that withstood critical thought. And when I did that I realized a lot of things I had accepted because "everyone knew" they were true -- from the "liberal media" thing all the way down...was a pile of unadulterated crap designed to keep us all at each others' throats. And after 7 or 8 years of this, with the evidence of it piling up all around us, I cannot understand why more people still fall for it. The only explanation I can think of is people cannot stand to be wrong (myself, I would desperately love to be wrong about this, but nearly all the evidence so far points the other way, unfortunately). And all I can say to that is, I wish more people spent some time alone thinking trying to disprove their own point to themselves, before trying to prove it to someone else.

I know, what? Who does that?

Now we're a nation of people that bemoan how polarized we've become, while at the same time trashing the very ideal that enabled us to come together in the first place; the idea that diversity and tolerance are good, and that the other guy might have a point, and by considering that person's unique perspective, we make the country stronger. That's how we GOT here, people. It wasn't from all getting in our little idealogical teepees and closing our ears and crying, like Eddie Murphy in TRADING PLACES, "yah, yah, yah, I'm not listening to you!"

Here Comes The '70s Show!

Next Tuesday I, with the help of the Chaos Band, am going to be putting on the fourth installment of "Adam's '70s Show" at the tiny westside Americana joint known as the Cinema Bar.

For those not in the loop, the idea is to bring together various people in the roots and pop communities in L.A. and invite them up with the band to sing a '70s song of their choice. They can pick any song they like, as long as it's not ridiculously complicated (e.g. ELP or Zappa), and provide us with an mp3 if we don't have it.

It took people a while to catch on the possibilities of this concept, but they've caught up now. We have something like 20 guests on tap for Tuesday, and most of them have been very -- um, creative about their song choices. Since the band has roughly four two-hour rehearsals to learn 17 or 18 new songs, some of them quite complicated, that along with the heat has created a pleasant little Chaos Band pressure cooker in our little garage, as we blast through these songs as fast we can, making sure we get to all of them before the time runs out. Together with retuning songs from other shows, my solo set, and Chaos-performed '70s covers, we figure there will be upwards of three dozen '70s songs performed.

As I posted on my Facebook page, one guest requested a Steely Dan tune that turned out to be quite simple. Another guest requested a Partridge Family tune that turned out to be ridiculously complex (and never mind those six-part harmonies). In terms of difficulty of the material, this is easily the most challenging '70s show yet, but the band is making a pretty fair first of pulling it all together. It's amazing what you can accomplish when you actually have to.

It always fascinates me the songs people pick out for this thing, stuff I would never think of. There's not a lot of country music chosen...the closest thing this time is a pretty fingerpicking singer-songwritery hit, where I get to further expand my newly developed fingerpicking skills (I learned for the first time at the Alex Chilton show). There's yet another Van Morrison tune, but no one's complaining about that. Shockingly, Supertramp, Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones were requested for the very first time. But my favorite of all of the requests, for the second show in a row, came from Brian Whelan. Last time he picked out an obscure Fleetwood Mac tune, "I Know I'm Not Wrong." This time it was an absolute classic of Memphis soul. Every time we play the midsection of this song, everyone in the band smiles and starts to relax. I said to Evie, "every time we hit the bridge I remember why I started playing music" and she grinned, "yeah! Me too!"

I love the challenge of learning new material. It seems all I do these days is learn songs, but I don't mind. I play so much now that I surprise myself at what I can do (and sometimes what I can't...I had to woodshed for a day or so to be able to play one electric piano lick by that great prog rock pianist, Richard Carpenter), and what makes certain songs tick.

In the midst of all the '70s show activity, and me looking with some grimness at my dwindling bank balance, an unexpected though very cool opportunity has come up. Unfortunately, I won't be able to say what it is for about three weeks. But if it comes to pass, I think it will be a surprise to quite a few people.

In the meantime, don't miss Adam's '70s Show next Tuesday at the Cinema Bar....