Last October our Year of the Groove release was the electropop song Supermodel Astronaut. At the time I'd posted my Supermodel Astronaut Manifesto blog entry, but at the advice of someone close to me, I ended up taking it down when we got Huffington Post coverage for the Supermodel Astronaut Challenge. I couldn't predict where the media would take it, and I didn't want my words to be misconstrued and scrutinized, and sometimes you just don't know how other people will perceive things. But now that the spotlight's not shining so brightly on this, I want my words to live because I believe that women being hard on themselves is just a reflection of how culture can be hard on females in general.
The unorthodox story behind "Until I Have You"
As so often is the case, the path to creating anything is rarely short or straight, and this song is no exception.
As I've written in the past, one of the few remaining ways for songwriters/artists/producers to make money with music anymore is to license songs to film, TV, and advertising. Sometimes we get an email that has come to us [and goodness knows how many others], giving the specifics of what someone is looking for. Sometimes there's another song they've temped into their video, but it's a song that's either unavailable or too expensive and they want something that FEELS and SOUNDS like that song, but is NOT that song. And sometimes we decide to set everything else aside and do our best to crank something out that might fit their needs, in hopes that we might land the license and pay some bills.
From the vault... Sassy Big Band - 20th Anniversary Edition
As this spring semester comes to an end, and I go through the process of helping my graduate students have their charts played by the university big band, and get ready to do their culminating projects [like a thesis], I started reminiscing about the big band chart I didfor my master's project when I was in graduate school. I am just now realizing that it's exactly 20 years ago since I recorded this, so it seemed like a good time to post and share it for nostalgia. Also I feel really old...
Photo Shoots, Shoot outs, and a tick...
Recently Kurt and I had a photo shoot since we were running out of images to get us through the Year of the Groove. It's always kind of funny to me when, from the outside looking in, my life might seem a little extra glamorous for a day. I always feel like I need to make clear to people that it is only a mirage. And it's not even that people around me think my life is glamorous, because all they need to do is come to my house and see that my recycling is piling up, I only fold my laundry once a season, and nothing more than 12" back in my fridge is probably safe for human consumption. But online, it's so easy to filter what gets posted, and only allow the majority of acquaintances to get a glimpse of the highlights. [Don't we all do this? This is why we should never compare ourselves to others.]
The Story Behind "It's You I Love"
This month's release was one of our "in case of emergency, break glass" releases for the Year of the Groove. We had planned to put out a song I wrote called "Human" this month, but after talking about the promotional angles, we decided to wait on that one until we could properly line things up and not rush. So, we pulled out this track that was never officially released, polished up the mix, mastered it, and sent it through the pipeline. It would have been released eventually on an EP I've got planned in my head, but I'm excited it's out there now because I actually really love this track and I'm glad to be able to talk about how it came about.
When others give away what we worked so hard on...
One of the most frustrating and disheartening parts of releasing music in today's digital music marketplace is when perfect strangers take it upon themselves to freely give away the music that we have worked so hard on, and paid so much to create, thus discouraging the few remaining buyers from actually properly purchasing our work. After releasing our first record in 2007, one day I set up a Google alert so that any time a website was found with "Worldwide Groove Corporation" or "Chillodesiac" in the page contents, we would get an email with a link. Little did I know that within the next week I would get dozens of email alerts directing me to blogs where people [who make a habit of doing this regularly] had uploaded our album artwork and all of the music into downloadable files so people could just help themselves to our work without even connecting with or compensating us.