The rumors of The Go Ahead And’s death are greatly exaggerated…
Man, there’s a lot of news in The Go Ahead And world.
First off, I’ve decided that The Go Ahead And is a septet. I know of a few comedy duos, one or two comedy trios, but no septets, so I think I’m breaking new ground here.
It’s been almost exactly a year since the first album “Babies Don’t Have Hands” came out. I still think it’s a charming album, very representative of where I was at a year ago (both in mindset and in production ability), but I’ve learned a ton about music production this year, and I’m itching to make another Go Ahead And album as a follow up.
There were two videos made for songs on “Babies Don’t Have Hands”. Both were made during my trip to Atlanta last year. My friend David shot the first one, for my song “Working Hard To Be A Hipster”, which was made at my friend Christy and Doug’s house. The other video was for my Star Wars song, “TK-421, Why Aren’t You At Your Post” which was shot by my former student Nabil. He never finished the video, or lost interest, or became angry with my impatience, and eventually dropped off the face of the map, or moved to Los Angeles, which is kind of the same thing.
Last year, I also made a Christmas album “Christmas and Glowsticks” (as a solo artist, not a septet). This album was definitely spawned from the same artistic sentiment as the Go Ahead And album. The whole philosophy behind “Glowsticks” was to make fun of crappy electronica Christmas albums, and instead to make a really awesome electronica Christmas album. “Glowsticks” never had an official release, and has never been available on iTunes or other digital download sites. I’m going to shop it around to some labels and see if I get any bites.
I also spent all of January making a Bossa Nova album. The songs still exist, but the project seems to have stalled. The intent there was to make a bunch of bossa nova backgrounds, and then distribute them to a bunch of my friends, who would then record gibberish Portuguese vocals over the backgrounds, and then send them back for me to mix together and release as an album. It’s still going to happen.
Then, I got a lot of work in theatrical sound design–which kept me occupied for the next few months. I made a lot of sound effects, and even ran the sound for a few. I discovered that I’m not well suited to the job of audio tech. I like creating the show, but I’m not as happy doing the show night after night. However, being offered a lot of money to run sound for a show would make me far more sympathetic to the task.
In addition to all of this, I have been making music, trying to get songs in the hands of music supervisors, and music libraries.
I’m really not satisfied with how the system works. See, TV shows and movies need music. Some of them have composers. All of them have music supervisors who choose the music for the show. There are these things called “music libraries” that have huge collections of songs in their catalog, and make these catalogs available to the music supervisors to license. This creates the need for an overabundance of songs that may potentially be used in a show–so the music supervisor has a large selection from which to choose music for his or her show. Meanwhile, there are thousands of songs in the catalog that are not chosen, and therefore don’t make any money for the composer. Before I leave this rant, my biggest problem with the way the system works now (besides creating such a surplus of unused songs) is that ideally, music should be written to accompany the drama. The whole idea of someone choosing songs from a catalog to fit into a dramatic scene is irresponsible and disrespectful both to the filmmaker and to the composer.
So anyway, I’ve been making a lot of music in pursuit of this golden apple. I haven’t made one cent yet from this.
Look for the new The Go Ahead And album “Trail of Meat” in stores soon.
