February 6
Cowboy Up!
Lot on my plate right now:
1. The CD is finished but I’m working on getting it duplicated soon. Tara’s been working a lot on the design and tweaking it like crazy to look awesome and I’m interested to see what it’s like when it’s done. It appears that we’re having it reproduced by Modulus Studio Arts, where we mastered our CD and I’m glad to be able to throw them some more business because they gave us a good deal for mastering. I’m just hoping to have everything done by February 26th, when we play the Paradise.
2. So, we made the Paradise on February 26th. We’re competing against three other bands in OurStage.com’s College Clash–Sam R-P, Ameranouche, and The Zach Hillyard Band. I don’t want to give out too much of our strategy (because this blog’s public) but we want to try and pull around 200 people for the battle. It’s decided by crowd vote with the top band taking away $5000. This competition is huge for us because with $5000 I can do a lot: I’ve decided if we win to donate $1000 to a local charity (haven’t figured out which yet). I’d like to be able to pay the band and my interns a bonus since we haven’t been playing tons of shows. Lastly, to be able to put away a few thousand dollars for recording would be awesome. I sincerely hope we can start recording by the beginning of the fall. It would be great to start rolling on that.
3. I leave for California on Sunday. I’m playing in San Francisco on Monday and am excited but we’ve had a hard time doing promo for the show. Tara and James have tried My Space, Kaitlyn (another intern from Roger Williams in Providence) did print PR by sending out press releases, and we’ve tried to get the word out that way. Luckily, there’s not much pressure because the show doesn’t pay and they don’t anticipate a draw but we’ve been trying and hopefully some people will find their way there.
4. Taxes suck. I’ve spent a handful of hours the last day doing taxes but this is the first time that I’ve filed as a musician. It’s cool being a musician but I’ve all ready learned like 50 things I’ve been doing wrong in regards to tracking my expenses. It’s also learning a whole new process whereas doing personal taxes only took me about an hour last year. I think I’m like 75% done but I’m worried that I’m entering things wrong. Luckily, I don’t make all that much money so I don’t think the government is going to come after me, and I think I’m getting better at making this work. Plus I’m using TurboTax Online, which is like taxes for dummies (making me the dummy).
5. We’re working on a new tour, which I’m excited about. I don’t think I’ve blogged about this before but I recently got contacted from Western Illinois University who is putting on a Taking Back The Campus event in April. It’s 1200 miles and 20 hours away but we’re doing it full band. James and Tara are (or at least appear) to be excited to help put a tour together and it looks like we’ll be doing 10 dates that could land us all over the place: Albany, NY, Rockaway, NJ, Cleveland, Chicago, NYC, Detroit…I’m excited because every tour I’ve done in the past has taken me down the east coast and I’ve never been west of Penn (on tour…I’ve been to Cali. once before and will be back this weekend). It’s going to be exciting times.
6. Also, I think I might be going back to school. It won’t be in the fall and I’m fleshing out my plan but I might be going for my masters and/or PhD in Musicology. I’m working on asking myself if it’s really what I want to do but I’ve been heavily thinking about where I think I fit into the music industry and where I can best serve and most importantly what I want out of my calling in music and I think there are potentially exciting prospects in this field, which is becoming more intellectually. Anyhow, I’ve started writing a couple blogs about that but I’ve dumped it each time halfway through. Hopefully soon I can get a full blog done on the subject. We shall see though.
So that’s everything…Well no, it’s never really everything but that’s where I’m going to leave it now. I’m getting pulled away but I hope to have some time each day while I’m in Cali to think and plan and blog.
We’ll see!