In December 1999 I met @hellpellet, the flaming pill that would change my life.

A little more than a year later, in early 2001, my grandmother passed away, devastating me.  A month after that I (along with about 101 other people) was laid off from my job.

I moved in with hellpellet across town and spent a while with my head deep in the sand.  Then there was 9/11, and everything seemed to be out of control everywhere.

At about that time I wrote this song based on a riff that Mike and I had come up with earlier.  It’s about being able to get through the day because hellpellet and I have each other for support when things get rough.  It’s become an anthem for me, but it’s also a gift for her and anyone else who is just keeping their head above water.

Special thanks to Coach Hanna for delivering the drums that made the song come alive.

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Continuing the thought from the previous post, here was another prevailing opinion from the excellent Podcamp 4 panel on “Promoting Music Through Social Media”:

• Record companies are essentially useless to artists at this stage, at least at the “you’re-not-super-famous-already” level. Future music will be released via corporate sponsorship (the brilliant example that came up was some company sponsoring Metallica, but I can’t remember what the company was. It was something like “Summer’s Eve presents Metallica”. I’ll have to watch the session video).

At some stage early on I thought I wanted a record contract. For years I played bar gigs with bands, wrote songs and made records, hoping that some A&R person would stumble onto my evident awesomeness.

Then there came the night when I was playing in someone else’s band, and while we were playing to yet another huge crowd and alleged “label interest”, I had an epiphany: I was not having any fun.

I realized that what I enjoy about music isn’t whether there’s a “deal” involved, or whether there’s a huge crowd. What I enjoy is the sheer freaky Zen of being taken away by the music that I’m playing (or listening to). Other-worldly joy. And I knew at that point that I didn’t need a record company. I just needed to find my musical happy place.

And it turns out that I need to make music whether anyone else is listening or not.

This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend Podcamp Pittsburgh 4, a social media conference put on by a big bunch of fellow media enthusiasts.

It was spectacular. I was motivated, inspired, educated, and at some points, possibly a little tipsy. And it was great to make some new friends that are interested in the same kinds of stuff we like to do around here.

There was a good panel discussion hosted by Sorg (who also hosts the Wrestling Mayhem Show) on using social media to promote music. It featured Walt Ribeiro and Ryan of Basick Sickness.

It was great to hear what other people are doing to successfully market their music, and some of the conversation got me to thinking. One of the topics that came up was:

• Nobody buys records (or CDs) anymore – it’s all a la carte downloads, or you’re giving away the album for free as a “loss leader”. Hopefully people will get into the music and buy something else from you – t-shirts, stickers, other merch.

I don’t know why I still want to shell out money to have a CD manufactured when only a small group of people are really into buying the physical record

• people who aren’t hip to new tech and the Inner Nets (sorry Mom)
• people who enjoy supporting a band by actually buying an album
• people that are drunk at shows

Maybe I like the physical album because after all the time that we spend working on recording and producing the music, I like to have, um, closure; it doesn’t feel like we ever really finished if the music never leaves the digital realm.

Regardless, the market’s changing, and anybody who makes music needs to adapt, drunkdudes included. I’m still mulling that over. But there’s already been some incremental change here in that we’re actually posting some music under a CC license. Wooo hooo baby steps.

And now I have to get some new merch for the band…

More on the panel in part 2.

Once or twice a week we get together to work on new songs and to mix or master songs we’re planning to release. Sometimes we even rehearse on studio night. We should probably do that more often.

Tonight Mike and Scott sat down to finish the last track of an upcoming tune, and wound up writing something totally new instead. As of late, that’s highly unusual, but a welcome surprise.

Because we took about 8 years to record, mix, master and manufacture our first record since starting dd69, it’s weird that we’re working on new stuff. Honestly, the “new” stuff isn’t even new – it’s three or four years old. We’re on a three or four year lag between new material and stuff we’re actually working on. Well we’re trying to finally get it together. Better late than never, right?

Anyway, we recorded a couple tracks of us clapping for a song called “Wigs-N-Liquor”. It’s a song that blends all of the things we’ve come to know as drunkdude: a funky backbone riff; a juicy rock chorus; a bridge that we can’t really explain; vocals with soulish harmonies. All it needed before we could start mixing were claps.

As we did our clappage, Mike was suddenly struck with an idea for a new song. We literally shut the book on “Wigs” and started to record bits of the idea. We wound up importing it into Acid, where we mixed and matched a number of loops to try to flesh out the idea.

All in all, it was a good studio night, and idea juice was enjoyed by all. Apparently this time it worked. Again.