Monthly Archives: June 2014

Radio Bean – 06.14.14

Boy, am I late writing this up.

This past Saturday I performed the first of three scheduled brunch dates at Radio Bean. Music was played. Peppermint tea was consumed. Fun was had.

I normally only play for forty-five minutes to an hour; I put together my set list by carefully reviewing my list of original songs and choosing 10-11 of them based on my mood and what I played at previous shows. If I recall that a particular song got a good reaction at my last show I will throw it on the list. If I recall that a song got a terrible reaction I will leave it off the list, unless I really want to play it and then it’s “screw you, audience, what do you know about music, you’re going to sit there and listen to this song and like… hey where are you going? shit.” … I also like to choose two or three cover songs to throw into the mix. I love to play the music that makes me love music and often dream about starting various cover bands dedicated to individual artists – past thoughts have included a Beatles cover band, Elliott Smith cover band, Allman Brothers cover band, Howard Jones cover band, Huey Lewis and the News cover band, and a GWAR cover band (pretty sure that one was a food poisoning induced fever dream).

Anyway, once I have the list of songs, I will put them into an order, run through them once or twice to make sure it flows correctly and then NEVER DEVIATE FROM THE SET LIST! When I’m in front of the audience and I play a song that doesn’t really connect with them and I know that the next two songs are sort of similar, I play them anyway because you NEVER DEVIATE FROM THE SET LIST!

Anyway, For this series of gigs, I get to play for two hours, so I get to choose around 20 of my originals and 4-6 cover songs, which is pretty sweet. And I thought I would try something different, since I had two hours, I thought maybe I should try and read the crowd a bit more and just play the songs that feel right, which is a long way of saying that I didn’t go in with a set list. I went in with a song list and just played. I think it worked for about 90% of the show, but I’m happy with that success rate. I’m not sure I’ll ever do it again, though.

In any event, here are the songs that I played, in no particular order:

  • Gravity
  • Rehearsing Our Goodbyes
  • Ordinary Day
  • Jesus in Chains
  • All the Same to You
  • While Watching the Window
  • Mind this Mind
  • Let You Down
  • The Whole – this is a new one, played for an audience for the first time
  • Redemption on Pearl
  • The Interrogator (enhanced)
  • Stupid Lullaby
  • Drones
  • My Fear of Losing You
  • So Lovely
  • For Milly – With Mostly Squalor
  • Dogs at the Door
  • You Know
  • The Meanest Thing I’ll Ever Write
  • The Pentophobe
  • A Jerk’s Lament

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Covers:

  • Angeles – Elliott Smith
  • Blackbird – The Beatles
  • You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away – The Beatles

That’s it. It was fun. I’ll play a lot of the same music this Saturday, with the exceptions of the covers (unless someone specifically asks). Come down. Have brunch.

Dear @HP – you really messed up

Just today I received an automated email from HP asking me to complete a survey on my recent experience with their technical support team (loyal followers will recall that the experience was less than ideal). What follows is my response because I want this information somewhere other than HP’s internal survey mechanism where who knows what will happen:

“The overall servicing was a complete failure! Not only is the issue not resolved, your technician erased EVERYTHING on my data drive (the drive not being replaced). I have a two hard drive system with an OS drive and a Data drive (two actual hard drives, not one partitioned drive). The OS drive needed to be replaced so the technician swapped out my old drive for the new one and ran the windows recovery disks, but they installed onto my data drive; completely erasing two years of work, and ten years of photos, music, and other data. I have since had to send that drive to a forensics lab to try and recover the data, but have not been able to do so yet. This is completely unacceptable and I can’t understand how such incompetence is allowed to occur. Was the technician at fault? Do your procedures for swapping out an OS drive in a 2 drive system include removing the data drive until after the Windows recovery is complete? Because those are the instructions according the Microsoft Knowledge Base articles and the technician obviously didn’t do that. I have had to reclaim my original, failing OS drive from the technician in order to try and recover at least some of the data (as well as recreate my windows backup, which was erased). So now in addition to my problem not being resolved, I have a hefty bill from my local PC technician because I need to recover pictures of my children as babies, my father in law who passed away a few years ago, and two years’ worth of work. And while we’re at it, why is a hard drive less than two years old failing? My previous Dell computer went four years without an issue and was only upgraded to take advantage of faster systems and newer software.

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My alter ego works in IT. I understand that you cannot account for every unforeseen circumstance that may arise while working on highly complex systems. And I have to say that the technician that came to my house was very professional and agreed to return my original hard drive so that I could try and extract additional data from it. But man, did they mess up and you can rest assured, I was on the Internet within minutes, registering my disgust throughout the world. Worst episode ever.

The Cost of DIY

Milton Busker is primarily a one-man operation. There are many reasons for this; I have a pretty specific idea of what I want to sound like. I don’t have a schedule flexible enough to accommodate regular rehearsals. The only competing priorities I need to juggle are my own. I don’t have to worry about paying anyone. No one suggests that I throw in more dance songs to please the crowd. Hell, there doesn’t even need to be a crowd. The whole list is quite extensive and perhaps I will compile it one day. Probably not though, because in all honesty it makes me sound like a DoucheTron 5000. The point is when it comes to music I usually work alone.

But naturally there are some things about working alone that kinda suck. Other people add spontaneity and different perspectives that can deepen and expand my original idea. They can push me forward and force me to go places that I wouldn’t have thought to go on my own. They can compensate for my deficiencies. They can provide cover when things go spectacularly wrong.

But I work alone.

This extends to other aspects like the business side of things. I am responsible for sales, marketing, and finance. I am my own producer and recording engineer, and that’s where I’m really headed with this.

Something has gone pretty wrong. For the past two years I’ve been slowly amassing a collection of songs in order to release a full album. No magnum opus or anything like that. I’m not out to create a masterpiece, I just want to share with anyone who’s interested in listening (and maybe daydream that A LOT of people are interested). I record onto my personal computer and thought I had taken the necessary steps to keep that data safe – keep the OS and the data separate; run regular backups. And when one of the hard drives started failing I called up HP and had them send a new one and a technician. I ran a backup before he came to do the work. I didn’t keep any of my recordings on the drive being replaced so I felt pretty good about everything.

But they erased my hard drive. The one with the backup on it. The one with all of the pictures of my family. The one with my entire iTunes collection (with many recordings that no longer have the source material).
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And they erased my recordings. The ten songs that I was planning to release this fall as a full length album entitled “You Are What You Pretend to Be”. They still needed some final mixing tweaks. The bass was too heavy in one track. The backup vocal on another was just a bit flat.

I was even going to get it professionally mastered. But now it’s not there.

I am a barely contained ball of rage and despair right now, but there is some hope. My hard drive is now with a forensic specialist and it’s possible that some of the data may be retrieved. Perhaps even a lot of the data will be retrieved. But not all of the data will be retrieved and I will need to reevaluate the plans I had just a few days ago.

Maybe this is a good thing, right? Hemingway lost all his manuscripts before he was successful and it allowed him to rid his work of dead ends that he couldn’t stop himself from going down. Maybe I had a lot of stuff that needed to be purged so that I could create something even better.

Shit, did I just compare myself with Hemingway? What a jerk.