My First Album’s Out…Now What?
🗓️ August 30, 2024
⏰ Read Time: 5 min
This edition isn’t a press release unveiling a secret project which is set to take the world by storm. It’s a meandering think tank where I process at you, hoping that it’s at least entertaining, and at most, mutually valuable. So here goes nothing:
My first album is out…now what? Let’s take a step back. As a kid, “doing music” was simple — a person with black, tight clothing, aggressively styled hair, and an affinity for smoke machines gets paid to strut about a stage with thousands of people having the time of their life watching on. Easy peasy, sign me up. Then you actually try to learn an instrument, or, God help you, perform in front of people for the first time. It’s a quick lesson in the dissonance between perception and reality. But against all odds, you get over the calloused fingers and the blushing red stage fright, and start to think “ok, I can do this.” What they (MTV? Magazines? Documentaries about boy bands?) don’t tell you is that all of that talent and skill stuff is the easy part. Jump cut to a few years later. The rent is due, the electric bill is higher than normal, and the long treks to play for empty rooms begin to feel like driving on tires without any rubber. But it means progress — it means the game is afoot, and whenever you start using words like “afoot,” surely good things are just around the bend, right?
We here at Joseph Bones LLC (yourself included) stand at the precipice of something big. How big? Well answering that is like hopping into a lake — you don’t really know how deep it is, and if you did, you might not have jumped in the first place. But there’s a lake here, to be sure. With no label, no connections, no prospects of opportunity, no boss, no authority telling us what to do, how to do it, or why it must be done…anything could happen. I mean anything! Let’s dream for a minute. What would be the coolest thing we could make? How about an album that reinvents the way people think about music? Hm… feels a little… much. What if it wasn’t an album, but something which was better able to translate ideas between you and I, reshaping our engagement with art and patronage? I’m not even sure what that means, but it proves the point — it could be anything.
Creativity comes from the tight-spots, the dead-ends, the rocks-and-hard-places. In my limited experience, it’s the product of parameters that say “you can’t go left, but you can go as far right as you want.” So how do we find a limit, a wall, some sort of “no trespassing” sign to open up a new world to us? Let’s start by asking “what do we NOT want to make?”
I don’t want to make something that sounds like everything else. I don’t want to make something easy. I don’t want to make something that’s able to be easily categorized, and therefore, easily ignored. But these are all virtues, or broad rules-of-thumb. How can I achieve them with specifics? Let’s take number 1: “I don’t want to make something that sounds like everything else.” Well then I probably shouldn’t record it like everyone else does. I shouldn’t write it like everyone else does. I shouldn’t sing it like everyone else does…
But let’s pause for a moment — why all this comparison with “what everyone else does?” A data and insights company made the claim that 120,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify (where 80% of music is consumed worldwide) every day. Every single day — that’s bonkers. Even if half of those songs are even halfway decent, that’s 60,000 halfway decent songs that algorithms and listeners like you and I have to sift through to find any that we connect with. Which of course, means that we probably won’t hear even one of those tracks. It makes the task of writing “better” music in comparison to those 120,000 immediately impossible. First, there’s no way to know if it is actually better; second, there’s no such thing as “better” music. Yet, despite it all, we music makers have to wake up and figure out some way to be heard. Not that being heard is the goal of making the music, but it is certainly one of the chief obligations once the music has been made. So then we are left with things like TikTok, YouTube, and all the other grab bags of social media, filling up other’s feeds for the chance at virality. Sweet attention, which means numbers, which means success, right? It feels like buying up as much chocolate as possible, just for that hope of a golden ticket. But the thing about that story is that most of the folks who got that golden ticket ended up WAY worse off than before they had it. I mean come on…turning into a blueberry? No thanks TikTok, you can keep your empty promises.
But I digress — I’ll amend my earlier comments, and say here’s what I want to make, more than anything. I want to make music that surprises, satisfies, and sings with you. Then I want to figure out how to best deliver it to you and others like you in a way that is not sensationalized, not over seasoned, and just as satisfying as the music itself. If we can do that, then they can keep their golden tickets, their algorithms, their 120,000-song-competition for attention, and we can part ways with that carousel of noise as friends. What do you say, should we give it a shot?
Your friend,
Joseph Bones
P.S. If you read this far, you’re a hero, and you’ve just been given a small taste of the incoherent ramblings of pseudo-philosophy that my wife must endure on a daily basis. Your check’s in the mail, and your sympathies for her are greatly appreciated.
