Band Management: Blog 29: Content Creation

I am managing “Band A” for one year – and during this year Band A will head into the studio at least a couple of times. They’ve been invited byKafadan Kontak Records to add a single to a Suicide (NYC band) compilation album, and then they’ll probably head back to El Rancho Morbido Studios with Edward Madill again in the fall to record some originals. It seems to work for Band A to have 5 songs, mostly worked through, and spend 2-3 days in the studio. 
A band works hard to get a core 8 songs so they can play one of those 30-minute sets as part of a 3-band line-up. Then the band works on getting 24 songs, so they can play a dive bar for three hours. And then there’s the process of writing better songs and letting other songs go. Joe Strummer says you have to play live so you can hear which song is a “turkey.” Bruce Springsteen and Keith Richards talk about working on covers first, so you understand song writing, and then replacing covers when the band plays an original that is better than a cover. 
So Band A finally gets enough songs – and THEN you have the question of how and when you replace old favorites with new songs. Some people are always writing (Derek Frye, Brandon Holcombe, BROTHRS, etc…), every single day, and to ask them to stop is impossible. I am always interested in this, the artist’s creative process. It is one of the most fascinating things in the world and I’ll happily sit and listen to an artist talk about process for hours. Creativity is a slippery process and meanders in its own direction. 
I’ve been on the Connecticut Shore for two weeks. For about six months I’ve had this image of a house in Connecticut. This house that collects all the memories a mother passing when I was in my mid-twenties, of family members and addiction, of the house witnessing the family holding together. My father owns a house on the Connecticut shore which faces a mansion on an island. So this initial idea of this resonant house was turned into the line: “there’s a house on the Connecticut shore that faces a billionaire’s island.” I’d been playing with B-minor, D, and A chords, which seemed to work with that line. Then I thought about the song being anti-billionaire and anti-capitalist, but I’ve written too many of those songs. I thought about the song being about a rich girl on the island and a poor boy on the shore – but that’s a cliche. Also, I’m shit at writing love songs – my love songs are usually opaque and hidden in 17 levels of bs. So I listened to the words and listened to the rhythm of the words and how they fit in a line and how changing a single word changes the intent – and ended with a narrative about a boy and a girl going over to the mansion in the dark and burning it down. It kind of has a punked-out Celtic feel, a slightly more folksy version of The Pogues – I blame this influence on Jim Mccarthy and Skunk Ruckus… 
Anyway, here is photo of a storm descending on the Connecticut shore. We had a couple of days of 97 degrees and then this storm hit… I was in the passenger seat of a car. The flowers in the foreground are a blur but the tree is in focus.