1. My new album is some version of ‘done’. There’s a few finishing touches, my friend Leah is singing on a couple songs and once that’s done, it’s all gonna be sent away for mixing. You’ll hear some things this year! If I did a livestream playing you my whole album, would you watch?

2. I missed out on NZ On Air album funding so had to reduce the scope of the album a little bit. And that got me thinking about a few things… one of which was this: what type of discography do I want to have? I think there are essentially two types of discographies (well these are the two ends of the spectrum and everyone falls somewhere in between). One is the Frank Ocean/Fiona Apple/Joanna Newsom/Vashti Bunyan/My Bloody Valentine/Beyonce discography; each album is years and years of work, each album is a ‘masterpiece’, an ‘event’, the artist is a ‘genius’, etc. Each album takes them into a new tier/phase of their career. The other type of discography is the Guided By Voices/Mountain Goats/Jeffrey Lewis discography. Lifers. Incredibly prolific. Sprawling (and maybe intimidating) discographies where most casual fans wouldn’t even be aware of most of the albums. They don’t wait for each album to be digested, and they don’t tour each album for 3 years, they just want to put out as many albums as possible. The albums aren’t events. The artist is, as I would describe it, ‘showing their working’. Will Oldham and Robert Pollard don’t care if a particular album doesn’t become the biggest thing ever; they’ve already got another one ready to go. Quantity IS quality. Work fast and hard, let the listeners decide if something is a masterpiece and let the listeners decide if they want to keep up. The albums might not be super distinct from each other, but if you listen close, you’ll see evidence of growth, a formula slightly tweaked and perfected, slow incremental improvement of their craft. I think about the novels of Anne Tyler… 25 novels and they’re all roughly about the same thing, but each work gets to the truth of it just a little bit more.

   I think the latter is the type of artist I aspire to be. And I think to be that sort of artist, you need to not be a perfectionist, you need to be okay with a large amount of your work being ignored, and you need to be able to make albums cheaply. This last one is the most important.

   Publicity is one of the biggest costs for an album (if you haven’t released an album with PR before, it might shock you how expensive and inaccessible it is), and it’s often treated as a necessity at a certain stage in your career. You want to always be ‘levelling up’! Don’t you??? Well, what if I don’t? If my priority is to just put out as many albums as I can, maybe I don’t need to worry about making each album more ‘buzzy’ than the last! Do you want to hear something crazy? The money that we think we need to spend on PR and marketing for an album, I could probably use that money to make 2 more albums. So maybe I should? What I value most in the art at the moment is immediacy. Maybe my next album isn’t going to get much press. It likely won’t. But maybe it’ll get just enough. We’ll see. By the way, I have a huge amount of respect for anyone in music PR, and you deserve the pay you get, and you do great work. It’s just that most of us musicians can only BARELY afford it!

3. In my last newsletter (when I was lamenting the end of the Bandcamp, non-algorithmic discovery days), I maybe came across a little bit like the sheriff at the end of No Country For Old Men. But it wasn’t really about Bandcamp as a platform itself. It was that it was an an honest-to-god SCENE. It was a community with genuine goodwill toward each other. Everyone shared each other’s work more than their own. We were all internet friends. That goodwill always leaks outside the scene and becomes inviting to others. Fans become artists. A few people from late 2010s bedroom pop/Z Tapes adjacent scene have blown the hell up. Jordana, In Love With A Ghost, Fog Lake, Skirts… all people who have genuine goodwill because they were part of that scene and they supported other artists too. No one was using the scene for clout (okay maybe one person but we don’t talk about them). No one was a careerist. I think marketing, press, social media strategy, industry showcases, etc… that all comes second to this. Stop trying to create an illusion of success. Don’t worry about your follower count (or even worse, your follower/following ratio). Don’t see yourself as above or below anyone in your scene. Open for artists that might be considered ‘smaller’ than you. Streaming platforms, press outlets, social media platforms, these all come and go. But scenes will always exist! I’m inspired by the Hallogallo scene. I don’t feel hopeless about the future of independent music; the zoomers are saving the day!

4. The main reason social media strategy is generally bad for music is that it kind of goes against what art is supposed to be. Most of life is just ‘getting by’; going to work, getting home, making dinner, doom-scrolling, sleep, etc. A song (or any work of art) should shake you out of that! If we are trying to get a song to be successful on the algorithm, we are using our art to keep people glued to the algorithm. Is that what we want artists to be doing? Is that why we write songs?? Why are we doing this?

   (And why is this still the main metric that decides whether or not you get government funding LOL)

5. Idea for album roll out:

   The album rollout is kind of backwards. I call this mailing list a ‘devlog’ is because I like how indie game developers roll out their games. With an album, you finish the album, have it mixed and mastered, all of this without fans having heard any of it. Then when it’s finished, you release pieces (‘singles’) of the finished thing to get people interested in the album, and then you release the album. The listener then begins her journey with the album as the artist ends their journey with it. The listener doesn’t go on the journey of creation with the artist. Whereas with an indie game, it’ll be announced in the super early stages, there will be alphas and betas and demos and playtests and then on the launch day, the game already has a community of fans. What if instead of releasing singles, musicians released demos of unfinished songs while they are making the album, and then on album release day, they release the finished mixed/mastered album, and some of the songs, people have already heard rough versions of them. So the experience of the listener is much closer to the experience of the musician. Just an idea!

Thanks for reading! I didn’t proofread or edit this, sorry.

Pickle Darling