A collection of some of the backstage passes I’ve kept through the years of rocking.
Will Cady's Ego
Musician, Artist, Writer
Filed under Mainstream Culture …
Musicians on Film: Ned Sedlak
I have a few shots taken from this one session with the Thunderbird Family, the greatest indie folk band no one’s ever known. I’ll continue release more photos from the session as time goes on because I love the way the film came out on my old Nikon camera (which has since broken thanks to my naive trust of American Airlines). This felt like the right one to start with.
This is my old college roommate Ned Sedlak! Ned’s the man! He’s kept himself in the business since graduation working at Sony BMG and Warner/Chapel out in LA until moving on over to NYC to be a Production/Marketing Coordinator at tinyOGRE Entertainment. Ned’s a bad ass.
In this picture, Ned’s jammin’ out on the flute during an awesome session that took place in my old apartment at 1111 Boylston St right across from Berklee. That place was so filthy it was beautiful. He was the ‘utility’ guy of The Thunderbird Family, playing guitar, flute, and saxophone.
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Have a Very Michael McDonald Christmas This Year
Careful, or Mike’s smooth voice and sexy innuendo’s about Christmas will get you.
Does this groove remind you at all of ‘Dick In A Box’? There had to be some inspiration pulled from Michael McDonald…with a little Boyz II Men and Bobby Brown thrown in the mix.
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The Day I’m As Cool As Billy Preston Will Be…Never
This video is lifted from the start of the documentary Before The Music Dies. Somehow this clip found its way in front of me again. I don’t know, probably Reddit. If you’ve got the time, give it a dedicated watch. The movie came out about five or six years ago and it is a warning cry about the trend away from talent in the music industry. Alarming.
That’s not why I posted this video though! I have faith in Music still, despite that documentary. I posted this video because Billy Preston is a certified bad-ass. Look at that dude go! The day I am as cool as Billy Preston will be…never.
What you’re watching here is a very, very talented presentation of what it feels like to be free.
Wobblin’ all over the world: Three Lessons on How To Capitalize When You Go Viral
About two months ago I met with a guy named Nathan Navarro on behalf of Source Audio to put a new pedal in his hands. He had sent in some videos that he had done with the Hot Hand and we loved his work. He’s a great dude, a solid player, and he’s dedicated to putting himself out there. He’s a real tastemaker; someone whose choices influence others. Essentially, we figured that the cost of giving him the pedal was worth the potential upside of him, well, using it.
We had a lot of faith in Nathan, but apparently we underestimated him. About a month after our meeting, he came out with a video using Source Audio pedals that went viral, passing the 1 million view mark in less than three weeks after its release. Within days, our web traffic increased by about 25x and demand for our pedals skyrocketed to levels we’ve never seen.
In a previous post on this blog, The Discoverability of Brilliance, I tried to identify the key traits behind something that goes viral. My conclusion was that something needs to be remarkable and poignant to go viral. Nathan’s video fits that criteria perfectly.
The video is a live band cover of Skrillex, the white-hot dubstep talent who has made 2011 his year. No one had done live band dubstep before. It’s a branch of music based in electronica that in a sense uses the sounds of speakers and audio equipment as instruments. It’s designed to be played LOUD so you can feel the sound in your chest. Big distorted bass scoops known as bass wobbles make your stereo sound like a poltergeist jumped inside. Those bass wobbles are a genre defining sound that has for a while seemed impossible to create using actual instruments.
Fortunately for Source Audio, the Hot Hand that sat floundering for years became the solution to a problem that didn’t exist at the time of its creation: creating ‘organic’ bass wobbles. The problem was vexing enough to merit regular discussion on forums and even to spawn its own popular Facebook group.
All of a sudden, the necessary flair of using the Hot Hand that had once been thought of as a bit silly, is now rippling over the internet. YouTube videos of Hot Hand bass wobblers have started to appear en masse in just the last month. Here are a few:
So we went viral! Cake for everyone! Now what?
There’s all this talk out there about making something viral and not enough talk about what to do after something goes viral. I’ve learned from experience that it can be a bit of a let down to go viral and not be prepared to do anything about it:
So here we are with the big question: What do you do when you go viral? How do you capitalize it?
1.) Have an infrastructure in place ready to seize the excitement.
We were fortunate at Source Audio that we had already put a slew of videos in place that served to either ramp up excitement even further or to inform people on the nitty gritty details of each pedal. We had these videos because we were trying to chip away our place in the crowded world of effects pedals. Think of that as our running game and viral as our passing game. You can’t just lean on the possibility of an 80 yard touchdown pass to score. When Nathan’s video went viral, we had a slew of videos right there in the YouTube search results and related video fields ready to answer people who were asking, what is that thing? Even better, all of our videos pointed to a website that was designed to guide someone from ‘interested’ into ‘gotta have it’ into ‘bought it’.
Tip: Make sure to adjust the keywords and descriptions of all the content in your ‘infrastructure’ so that it tailors to whatever piece of content went viral. You’ll already have an advantage over competing search results if something about you went viral, but even the slightest change can make the difference of hundreds of views per day. Literally.
2.) Interact aggressively.
We spend a huge amount of time every day responding to comments on YouTube videos (not just on our own, but on any related to us), fielding questions in forums, generating conversation on our own Facebook page and in Facebook groups related to us.
We’ve found that people tend to have lots and lots and lots of questions before they make a final decision on buying anything. By tracking down their conversations and going to them, we not only get our message out there, we amaze them with our attentiveness.
Below are some really concrete tips from experience that can help you out on this:
Tip 1: Most forums give you the option of subscribing to threads, which is a great way to have updates on key conversations sent straight to your inbox. Make sure to not just push an agenda. You’re not just trying to make a sale, you’re participating in an existing culture and trying to foster your own.
Tip 2: Use Google Keywords to get notifications on any blog that picks up a story related to you. When they do, send them an email and thank them for giving you coverage. Keep in touch with them, interact on their site, and if you support them, they’ll be there for you when you’ve got a story to push.
Tip 3: If you’re serving as a face of a brand, decide ahead of time if you want your personal online accounts like Facebook and Twitter to be open to relationships formed through marketing. I’ve kept mine open and it’s been a really cool way to meet some awesome musicians. But that’s my passion so I’m happy. If you’re marketing toothpaste on the other hand…
3.) Don’t stop at the sale. People don’t exist to buy and sell things, they exist to share ideas.
Nike isn’t just shoes and sportswear. It’s the concept of pushing your boundaries and not letting yourself give up. ‘Just Do It’. Their sales may keep the lights on now, but its the idea their sharing with the world that gives them longevity and legacy. In the case of artists, generating a sincere following is the lifeblood for your entire career. So how do you define what your idea is and how do you spread it after the glow of going viral wears off?
Source Audio has an old-school feedback system built into the sales process. Sure, Facebook and Twitter are sexy right now, but you’ve got to have your blocking and tackling too. In our case, we’ve got a card included in every one of our pedals that offers a free ‘wired hot hand’, an obsolete version of the Hot Hand before it went wireless. To get the ring, all you have to do is email us and we’ll send you one for free.
The key here is that the person handling those emails is either going to be me or one of the other guys in the office here and not a computer or automated process. Even more important is the message we’re sending in our response: Here’s a hot hand. Use it and we’ll promote what you do…and in the meantime, tell us a bit about yourself.
The result is a growing community of constant sharing that exists beyond the realm of Facebook or Twitter. It’s a community full of evolving relationships not just based on Source Audio selling to customers, but based on the question, ‘How can we use the Hot Hand to create awesome music?’
So when Evan Marien, whose video I posted above, puts out that slick in-studio drum and bass video using the Hot Hand, he gives me at Source Audio some ideas for what I can do for the next fun video that we release. I’m sure Nathan is watching too. And so are guys like Paul, Dan, Christoph, Andres and all the other bad-ass bass players who are getting down on the Hot Hand. What can we do next?
Head over to the SOURCE AUDIO WEBSITE to see the videos, pedalboards pics, and quotes that define the evolving Source Audio community.
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The Lord of Labor and the Goddess of Love
It’s a hard path we walk as musicians today. Maybe it’s a measure of the current times that we have to carve our creative place out of a world full of labor that has no interest in the songs we want to sing. Or maybe that’s the way it’s always been. The challenge is to beat the labyrinth of obstacles placed in front of us year after year and earn our right to be heard, our right to fully and completely identify ourselves and be known as musicians.
The story of Brown Bird and the story of their album Salt For Salt is about earning that passage. It’s akin to the story of a seedling pushing through the concrete to greet the Sun it’s been chasing as the tree it was always meant to be. In the case of songwriter David Lamb, the seedling was the collection of lyrics and melodies that swirled around his head while he passed the long hours at the shipyard where he worked. Day-by-day, week-by-week, he’d trudge home at night to sit with his partner MorganEve Swain and try to make something grow. MorganEve, still with the dust of her own hard day’s work at a coffee roasting plant, watered each and every idea with her enchanting playing on the upright bass, fiddle or cello. The rhythm and thoughts that weave themselves through the working week, weave themselves equally through Brown Bird’s music.
Through the rigors of day jobs, teaching music lessons and finding the time to rest in between, Brown Bird somehow managed to add in three to four performances a weekend, all while developing and recording a great record. Hard work. It must have been worth it, because here they are. They’re free. They did it. They’ve managed to shake off the shackles of the working world and lift themselves into the life of full-time music. But how?
The most immediate answer is that they have remarkable talent. Listening to the new album is a transportive experience. In songs like “Ebb and Flow” and “Fingers to the Bone” you can hear the grease and dirt in David Lamb’s banjo as he fingerpicks away underneath the smokey hum of his voice. MorganEve’s vocal harmonies lend a warm feminine authority to his words of the workingman’s existence. Her rich bass playing adds an authority that goes even deeper.
MorganEve was introduced to music at a young age through a private instructor who taught her the ways of the violin through the Suzuki method, an approach to teaching that seeks to create generations of students capable of a high level of musical achievement while maintaining a ‘noble heart.’ One of the core values of this method is the importance of saturating a young student with experiences in a musical community. As a result, MorganEve found herself venturing beyond her home state of Connecticut at an early age to play fiddle amidst the vibrant folk scene in Nova Scotia. It wasn’t until convening with David Lamb in Rhode Island that she added the cello and double bass to her arsenal, providing the bottom to Brown Bird. As new to the larger stringed instruments as she may be, her sense of melody and rhythm are so strong that her thumping notes become the very thunder in the beat of the up-tempo ‘whistle while you work’ tunes that permeate Salt For Salt.
It’s natural to listen to Salt For Salt and ask MorganEve and David how many overdubs or musicians they needed to capture the sound of the record. This is where the most remarkable side of Brown Bird comes in. Those flawless takes of soulfully picked guitar and banjo, perfectly cracked vocals, smooth string playing and surly percussion? That’s all recorded live and it’s just the two of them playing it.
As it turns out, David Lamb started his journey into music through the drum kit, living in Rhode Island and taking lessons from family friend and Berklee professor, Joe Galeota. Through the years of living and working in Boston and Seattle, David nurtured a collection of songs that eventually became Brown Bird, a band that at one point boasted five members. At first sight, he offers a lot to study and wonder about. His beard adds age to a youthful and exuberant face, but it feels like it belongs underneath his dark, pondering eyes, permanently fixed in a slight squint. A sleeve tattoo on his right arm leads down to his hands where he has the letters to the words ‘Come Home’ tattooed to his fingers. It’s hard not to wonder what home he thinks of when he looks down at those hands every day.
The imagery of his lyrics evokes the poetry of the Biblical writings that have inspired him. That sentiment, combined with his exhausted experience of working at a shipyard, makes for timeless verses that are as pained as they are proud. In “Fingers to the Bone” he writes,
I work my fingers to the bone
Not a pretty little penny have I got to show
I ain’t lookin’ for much, just a little bit of rest by the side of the road
I lift my voice to the forces above
To the Lords of Labor and the Goddess of Love
Ain’t I been a good, hard-working, faithful, serving son?
So it was that Brown Bird marched across the country, armed with a catalog of songs that tied the conditions of our present times to the great American Folk tradition. They hit the stage almost every weekend night channeling songs from the Anthology of American Folk Music, Johnny Cash, Howlin’ Wolf, and Muddy Waters. When they earned a spot at the Newport Folk Festival, they were seasoned enough and ready to capture the audience in front of them. Through the sales of their EP at the festival and the support system they garnered through their tireless gigging, they were able to scrap together the money that eventually funded Salt For Salt and their ticket out of the working world.
They’ll spend the next few months hitting venues in northern Vermont, upstate New York, Massachusetts and Maine. There’s no set CD Release Party and they’re not too concerned about that. This whole leg of a potentially endless tour is their personal release party and they’ll keep on doing it until, well, until it stops.
There’s not a clear end to the next chapter in the history of Brown Bird. They’re running from something more than running to anything. They’re leaving the struggling balancing act of work and music behind and hitting the road with a record so brilliantly simple and authentic that it bypasses any and all cynicism and heads straight to the heart. After all, how many readers of this very magazine greet every morning as a new day in an endless fight to claw their way through the concrete of the working world? David and MorganEve have been there and they’ve gotten to the other side. In a way, perhaps they themselves are the Lord of Labor and the Goddess of Love, setting out to spread the Gospel that you too can actually make it happen.
FOX News: The voice of the enemy within
I took this screenshot of Fox News’s home page at 5 pm on November 17th, the day of action following the NYPD raid on Zuccotti Park. With a rising total of at least 175 people arrested so far today (thank you BBC) and huge masses of people currently marching through the streets of NYC (live streaming video here), we are given Fox News’ lead story that 2 cops have been injured. I don’t mean to trivialize the injuries that those men or women sustained, but that is not the key narrative of what is happening right now. It is a clear effort to vilify a movement that has largely stayed peaceful and represents a the voice of a majority of the people.
Here’s the alternative at CNN website:
It’s pathetic that I was able to see more of the protests happening in Egypt (thanks to Al Jazeera) than I am able to see happening in my own country. I remember seeing reporters on scene and live footage of the key protests. Let’s not forget that a main storyline of every protest in the Arab Spring was of how the state run news agencies were propagating a false narrative in an effort to control the people. How can we really say now that the US stands above the rest in its treatment of democracy when our privately run news agencies are acting in such a similar fashion?
Those Arab protests are a matter of the people versus corrupt regimes. Those state-run news agencies were acting in accordance to the wishes of those regimes that owned them. They narrative they presented was a weapon aimed squarely at the protesters. In America, the Occupy protest isn’t against a regime, it’s against a sect of the economy, but the same elements are present in the media. FOX News is a weapon aimed squarely at Occupy. This is not reporting, this is propaganda that serves neither the people nor the state.
This new push for freedom is too radical for many at the top of the heap in America right now. Watching it unfold, it’s hard not to think our country has either fallen behind or lost track. If you disagree, tell that to Dorli Rainey whose face is likely shown on television screens all around the world…except for maybe America.
Music for the Sagan Series
I saw an open submission on reddit for music on the Sagan Series videos and was pretty psyched by the opportunity. As you may have noticed from my other posts…I’m a big fan. I wanted to act quickly so instead of writing and recording something totally new, I chopped up ‘The Hum’ and made it fit with the offered narrative. I haven’t heard anything back yet so I’m getting increasingly pessimistic about my chances of getting the gig. 
So I thought I’d drop the recording here!
This is How I do a Drum and Bass Jam
We recorded this video a long time ago, but we had it spliced up into three separate videos with these goofy talking introductions. Now we are trying to see how a video of straight music stands on the interwebs.
This is all in preparation for a big jam session that we have planned at Boston big-time studio, Q Division. It will be a big investment for us and we’re not quite sold yet on the idea that these types of videos will garner a lot of attention for Source Audio. I for one, think that these videos are awesome, but that’s because I love having the opportunity to jam my pants off.
Let me know what you think!
