Tuesday at the Bryant-Lake Bowl was an excellent start to the Hometown Tour. (Or the "Staycation Tour" as my friends have dubbed it.) I've played there before and I dig the "tiny theater" that they have. I haven't seen many rooms around the country like it.
The gig also had its own unique vibe and proportion. I think my energy was all there, but a little weird. The songs and the notes were wriggling around like cats in a bag; the squirminess wasn't unpleasant, it was interesting, but it kept suprising me. For example the version I played of "Honey Please" was full of strange variations on the piano and changes of tempo and arrangement, nothing I had planned, they all just kind of happened. Which is great, actually, when the spirit of the night is more powerful than the plan that holds it together.
I also unveiled my "Live at the Pantages" CD, which is a mail-order and stage only fan piece for now, but which I'm very proud of. Bought special Sharpies, urged the folks all to buy the record, and signed a lot of them at the end of the night.
Here's the set list:
FNT - fresh from the Current performance I did before the show. I am loving this song again, the rhythm of the guitar part jumps from my hands without effort these days.
Hand On My Heart
Turtle Dove - yes, the Trip Shakespeare song.
Great Divide
Baby Doll - everyone sang along to the "no one else" parts. I finally figured out why that last "no one else" in the chorus has singer-alongers confused. It's not there on the album but it belongs there and everyone instinctively knows that.
Your Brighter Days - new song, wrote it about someone I met on a plane
Sugar - on piano.
Act Naturally - suprised myself at soundcheck by playing this song on piano. I almost never play it and certainly not on the piano, but piano/voice is the perfect setting for it.
Greece story - okay this is not a song, it's a long story about my trip to Greece to play on their Mad TV Video Music Awards show recently. My parents were at the BLB on Tuesday, so I told the people how my Dad had alerted me a year ago to the MILLION views of a Youtube clip of "Breathless." This was a clip that only has the static picture of the "Free Life" album cover. My Dad said that something must be going on, and when I found out what it was, an adventure ensued.
Breathless - I wish I could have sung it in Greek but I did the English version.
All Will Be Well - song by me and Gabe Dixon. Always makes me happy.
Free Life
----
----
Honey Please - on piano, by request
Falling - also a request
All Kinds - nice singing everyone.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Gappy Information and the Multi-Tasking Illusion
I've been thinking about multi-tasking. I've never believed in it, never thought I saw anyone doing it well, or even actually really doing it. Never could do it well myself, anyway. Lately there's been a lot of talk about new research that shows how poorly multi-tasking works in comparison to doing one thing at a time. I like hearing that talk, of course, because it agrees with my already-formed opinion. But it's a subject that would interest me even if the research were saying I was wrong.
One reason I've been thinking about multi-tasking is that I've noticed people doing it around me a lot. I sit with friends at restaurants while they talk on their phones and answer e-mails at the same time they're talking to me. I feel like I'm sensing more often the distinctive "temporary stupidity" effect that occurs when someone is quietly checking and answering their e-mails while they're talking to me on the phone. Another reason multi-tasking has been on my mind is that it's in the news a lot. For example, there seem to be more and more stories about people getting killed by multi-tasking drivers of cars.
Another big reason I'm thinking about multi-tasking is that I've been making some changes to my life lately and I've noticed that a lot of the changes involve banishing multi-tasking from my daily experience. When I noticed that I was trying to banish it, I started thinking about it. Ironic.
My main conclusion so far is that multi-tasking is actually an illusion. A very convincing and vividly real-seeming illusion, but an illusion. And the reason that the illusion is so very vivid and real is that our consciousness is pretty much built to create the exact kind of illusion that allows us to falsely think we're multi-tasking.
The information coming to our minds through our senses is gappy, discontinuous, fragmented. Loud sounds interrupt conversations, but we comprehend and talk on. Beer salesmen and other fans pass in front of our eyes as we watch a baseball game, but we disregard the momentary gaps in our vision and continue to understand and enjoy the game. Even more basic, our eyes are constantly blinking shut, interrupting our flow of visual information, but we remain happily unaware of these brief moments of darkness.
Similarly, our actions throughout our days are constantly interrupted by sounds and sights that require attention. The doorbell rings during a conversation with a visitor; I get up, answer the door, sign the UPS driver's tablet, sit back down and continue the conversation. It's as though there were no interruption at all. The coffee which I put on the stove before I sat down to breakfast with my wife and daughters begins to boil; I get up, pour two cups of coffee, bring them to the table and resume eating my eggs, nearly unaware of the act.
So, our minds gather all of this gappy, discontinuous information from many different channels. And yet our consciousness feels smooth and continuous. If someone asked me about my breakfast I wouldn't say, "I ate two eggs for a few minutes, then was interrupted by the coffee boiling, then sat down and resumed eating my eggs and drinking my newly made coffee." I'd just say, "I had fried eggs and coffee," and the statement would feel complete and true.
For many years, I've been reading as much as I can about consciousness and what it is, and one theme returns again and again: one of the main functions of consciousness is to create and sustain for us an illusion of smoothness and continuity in our minute-by-minute experience, even when our senses are receiving interrupted, unrelated, or even contradictory signals. This feeling of smoothness may be an illusion, but it is a very useful one. It allows us to make sense of our actions and sensations, it allows us to maintain a coherent story as the sometimes confusing and contradictory information flows to us through our senses.
My impression is that when we multi-task (or think we are multi-tasking), we are engaging our minds' capacity to create this illusion, and then mistaking that illusion for reality. It's a misappropriation of our minds' capacity to create continuity from fragments. We are doing several things, spinning several threads, each in a discontinuous and gappy way, but our minds obligingly provide for us the illusion that each of these threads is discontinuous, unbroken; that we're doing all of these things continuously at once. We think we are multi-tasking when we are actually serial-tasking - attending to one thing at a time, each one in a choppy and discontinuous way.
Thus the sensation that we could still be "working on" the driving of a car during the same time in which we are reading a text message from a friend. Yes, we do feel very vividly that we are "still paying attention" to the road during those gaps, but that is because our minds are built to create just that illusion in our experience.
The illusion of smoothness and continuity isn't fully formed in us from birth. It develops and is refined over time. For example, a baby panics when its mother walks away to the next room. It's as if she has vanished from reality. But as the baby's consciousness develops, it learns to believe that Mom is "still there" even though she is out of sight. (Once this lesson is learned, it is a source of pleasure: when our mother hides behind a tree, we can delight in the magical feeling of knowing she's there even while not seeing her, and enjoy the suspense of testing our little theory - Yes! I found you!)
Or when we speak with a friend on the phone and the reception begins to deteriorate, we can keep the conversation going even through huge gaps in the transmission. In fact it takes a pretty radically bad connection to force us to give up and shout, "I'll call you back later!" We are able to take that interrupted sound information and either fill in the gaps with probable words, or if the gaps are too long, we just accept the gaps and stay in a suspended state, feeling that the next sentence might fill in the context and the gappy sentence will eventually make sense.
Films take advantage of this ability of our minds in a wonderful way - we can watch a scene which leaps from one character's speaking face to the other character's listening face and back, then to another wider view of the restaurant in which they are sitting, then to the image of the waiter carrying a tray of food through the swinging door of the restaurant kitchen, and then back to the faces of the two characters as they continue to talk. The sound of the film changes radically with each edit. And yet we don't think of this scene as a jarring series of unconnected pieces of information. We think of it as "the scene where the two characters are talking in the restaurant." The gappy information feels smooth.
Now, this creation of smoothness out of gappiness is really useful. Imagine if every time someone walked into the next room, you were suddenly unsure whether or not they still existed? How could you plan for the future if you couldn't assume the continuous existence of, say, your spouse, who has merely walked into the next room?
Also, imagine if you were unable to hold a conversation in a loud party where lots of other people were talking loudly around you. Or if you were unable to speak to someone during a series of brief but very loud interruptions. For example, what if you couldn't understand the lyrics of a song because a kick drum kept interrupting and briefly obscuring the sound of the singer's voice, as it does at any rock show and on lots of great records. (I would be particularly sad if I couldn't listen to singing while there was a drummer drumming.)
But when this illusion becomes unhelpful is when we engage it while trying to "save time" by doing several things at once. I spoke recently with a friend about this and he told me that sometimes he finds that he's "missed" the last couple of minutes of a phone call because he's been checking his e-mails on his cell phone while talking on the phone. "The weird part is that I'll be thinking I'm paying attention to the conversation but I suddenly realize that I have no idea what the other person has been saying. I find myself then listening carefully to what they say next, to try to get some clue or hint to what they've been talking about. That at least reduces the chances of my saying something irrelevant and looking like a jackass."
And of course it becomes a matter of life or death when the drivers around us on the highway are reading their e-mail, operating scanners and printers and thumbing text messages while driving, happy in the illusion that they've been watching the road during the same two minutes in which they've been feeding papers into the scanner. The blithe look on the face of the woman talking on her cell phone who recently sailed through a red light a few feet from my car was the happy face of someone having a very nice and involving conversation. But she obviously wasn't as aware of the world around her as I would have liked her to be.
In my life as a songwriter the temptation to believe in the multi-tasking illusion is not physically dangerous, but it's dangerous to the writing. It's so tempting to go from looking at the online rhyming dictionary to a quick peek at my e-mail or the front page of the New York Times' website. These seem like harmless and brief interruptions, and of course given the way our minds smooth over interruptions and gaps, they almost seem like no interruption at all.
But achieving the state of mind necessary for creativity is like lighting a match. Sometimes it's like lighting the match between cupped hands on a windy day. And it's not always easy to re-light it when the match is allowed to go out.
When I'm writing a song, I need uninterrupted time during which I have nothing else important to do and nothing else important to think about but music. Maybe you can, but I can't multi-task and be a songwriter. The minute I get on the phone and discuss something important or stressful or complicated or even something which engages my problem-solving mind, the songwriting flame flickers or goes out. The minute I open my e-mail application on the computer, the flame goes out. And it takes another half hour for me to get that fragile flame lit again, if I even can.
And we all know why people multi-task in the first place; extra half-hours are rare and precious in information-age America, year of 2009.
In a future entry, I'll write about the kind of distractions and interruptions that help me write songs. Perhaps I'll talk about parenthood and multi-tasking too.
One reason I've been thinking about multi-tasking is that I've noticed people doing it around me a lot. I sit with friends at restaurants while they talk on their phones and answer e-mails at the same time they're talking to me. I feel like I'm sensing more often the distinctive "temporary stupidity" effect that occurs when someone is quietly checking and answering their e-mails while they're talking to me on the phone. Another reason multi-tasking has been on my mind is that it's in the news a lot. For example, there seem to be more and more stories about people getting killed by multi-tasking drivers of cars.
Another big reason I'm thinking about multi-tasking is that I've been making some changes to my life lately and I've noticed that a lot of the changes involve banishing multi-tasking from my daily experience. When I noticed that I was trying to banish it, I started thinking about it. Ironic.
My main conclusion so far is that multi-tasking is actually an illusion. A very convincing and vividly real-seeming illusion, but an illusion. And the reason that the illusion is so very vivid and real is that our consciousness is pretty much built to create the exact kind of illusion that allows us to falsely think we're multi-tasking.
The information coming to our minds through our senses is gappy, discontinuous, fragmented. Loud sounds interrupt conversations, but we comprehend and talk on. Beer salesmen and other fans pass in front of our eyes as we watch a baseball game, but we disregard the momentary gaps in our vision and continue to understand and enjoy the game. Even more basic, our eyes are constantly blinking shut, interrupting our flow of visual information, but we remain happily unaware of these brief moments of darkness.
Similarly, our actions throughout our days are constantly interrupted by sounds and sights that require attention. The doorbell rings during a conversation with a visitor; I get up, answer the door, sign the UPS driver's tablet, sit back down and continue the conversation. It's as though there were no interruption at all. The coffee which I put on the stove before I sat down to breakfast with my wife and daughters begins to boil; I get up, pour two cups of coffee, bring them to the table and resume eating my eggs, nearly unaware of the act.
So, our minds gather all of this gappy, discontinuous information from many different channels. And yet our consciousness feels smooth and continuous. If someone asked me about my breakfast I wouldn't say, "I ate two eggs for a few minutes, then was interrupted by the coffee boiling, then sat down and resumed eating my eggs and drinking my newly made coffee." I'd just say, "I had fried eggs and coffee," and the statement would feel complete and true.
For many years, I've been reading as much as I can about consciousness and what it is, and one theme returns again and again: one of the main functions of consciousness is to create and sustain for us an illusion of smoothness and continuity in our minute-by-minute experience, even when our senses are receiving interrupted, unrelated, or even contradictory signals. This feeling of smoothness may be an illusion, but it is a very useful one. It allows us to make sense of our actions and sensations, it allows us to maintain a coherent story as the sometimes confusing and contradictory information flows to us through our senses.
My impression is that when we multi-task (or think we are multi-tasking), we are engaging our minds' capacity to create this illusion, and then mistaking that illusion for reality. It's a misappropriation of our minds' capacity to create continuity from fragments. We are doing several things, spinning several threads, each in a discontinuous and gappy way, but our minds obligingly provide for us the illusion that each of these threads is discontinuous, unbroken; that we're doing all of these things continuously at once. We think we are multi-tasking when we are actually serial-tasking - attending to one thing at a time, each one in a choppy and discontinuous way.
Thus the sensation that we could still be "working on" the driving of a car during the same time in which we are reading a text message from a friend. Yes, we do feel very vividly that we are "still paying attention" to the road during those gaps, but that is because our minds are built to create just that illusion in our experience.
The illusion of smoothness and continuity isn't fully formed in us from birth. It develops and is refined over time. For example, a baby panics when its mother walks away to the next room. It's as if she has vanished from reality. But as the baby's consciousness develops, it learns to believe that Mom is "still there" even though she is out of sight. (Once this lesson is learned, it is a source of pleasure: when our mother hides behind a tree, we can delight in the magical feeling of knowing she's there even while not seeing her, and enjoy the suspense of testing our little theory - Yes! I found you!)
Or when we speak with a friend on the phone and the reception begins to deteriorate, we can keep the conversation going even through huge gaps in the transmission. In fact it takes a pretty radically bad connection to force us to give up and shout, "I'll call you back later!" We are able to take that interrupted sound information and either fill in the gaps with probable words, or if the gaps are too long, we just accept the gaps and stay in a suspended state, feeling that the next sentence might fill in the context and the gappy sentence will eventually make sense.
Films take advantage of this ability of our minds in a wonderful way - we can watch a scene which leaps from one character's speaking face to the other character's listening face and back, then to another wider view of the restaurant in which they are sitting, then to the image of the waiter carrying a tray of food through the swinging door of the restaurant kitchen, and then back to the faces of the two characters as they continue to talk. The sound of the film changes radically with each edit. And yet we don't think of this scene as a jarring series of unconnected pieces of information. We think of it as "the scene where the two characters are talking in the restaurant." The gappy information feels smooth.
Now, this creation of smoothness out of gappiness is really useful. Imagine if every time someone walked into the next room, you were suddenly unsure whether or not they still existed? How could you plan for the future if you couldn't assume the continuous existence of, say, your spouse, who has merely walked into the next room?
Also, imagine if you were unable to hold a conversation in a loud party where lots of other people were talking loudly around you. Or if you were unable to speak to someone during a series of brief but very loud interruptions. For example, what if you couldn't understand the lyrics of a song because a kick drum kept interrupting and briefly obscuring the sound of the singer's voice, as it does at any rock show and on lots of great records. (I would be particularly sad if I couldn't listen to singing while there was a drummer drumming.)
But when this illusion becomes unhelpful is when we engage it while trying to "save time" by doing several things at once. I spoke recently with a friend about this and he told me that sometimes he finds that he's "missed" the last couple of minutes of a phone call because he's been checking his e-mails on his cell phone while talking on the phone. "The weird part is that I'll be thinking I'm paying attention to the conversation but I suddenly realize that I have no idea what the other person has been saying. I find myself then listening carefully to what they say next, to try to get some clue or hint to what they've been talking about. That at least reduces the chances of my saying something irrelevant and looking like a jackass."
And of course it becomes a matter of life or death when the drivers around us on the highway are reading their e-mail, operating scanners and printers and thumbing text messages while driving, happy in the illusion that they've been watching the road during the same two minutes in which they've been feeding papers into the scanner. The blithe look on the face of the woman talking on her cell phone who recently sailed through a red light a few feet from my car was the happy face of someone having a very nice and involving conversation. But she obviously wasn't as aware of the world around her as I would have liked her to be.
In my life as a songwriter the temptation to believe in the multi-tasking illusion is not physically dangerous, but it's dangerous to the writing. It's so tempting to go from looking at the online rhyming dictionary to a quick peek at my e-mail or the front page of the New York Times' website. These seem like harmless and brief interruptions, and of course given the way our minds smooth over interruptions and gaps, they almost seem like no interruption at all.
But achieving the state of mind necessary for creativity is like lighting a match. Sometimes it's like lighting the match between cupped hands on a windy day. And it's not always easy to re-light it when the match is allowed to go out.
When I'm writing a song, I need uninterrupted time during which I have nothing else important to do and nothing else important to think about but music. Maybe you can, but I can't multi-task and be a songwriter. The minute I get on the phone and discuss something important or stressful or complicated or even something which engages my problem-solving mind, the songwriting flame flickers or goes out. The minute I open my e-mail application on the computer, the flame goes out. And it takes another half hour for me to get that fragile flame lit again, if I even can.
And we all know why people multi-task in the first place; extra half-hours are rare and precious in information-age America, year of 2009.
In a future entry, I'll write about the kind of distractions and interruptions that help me write songs. Perhaps I'll talk about parenthood and multi-tasking too.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Dan's latest book report is on "The Freedom Manifesto," by Tom Hodgkinson
I was drinking espresso after lunch at my newly discovered favorite cafe in Minneapolis, Common Roots, and reading a book that my brother gave me recently. The book was "The Freedom Manifesto," by Tom Hodgkinson, and it is an inspiring and funny and lighthearted outline how to go off the grid, unhitch oneself from the expectations and burdens of modern society, and revive the joys and inspirations of non-modern life. If the book is an extended leftist pamphlet, it is one with no self-righteousness or drudgery, but instead with special emphasis on enjoying our time on earth. Tend a garden; grow your own vegetables; cancel anything with a monthly fee; get out of debt and stay out; drink more beer with friends; cook your own food; let the kids find their own entertainment outside; ignore the government; start a neighborhood council and use it to throw a great party every year; stuff like that.
I was laughing out loud at one particularly pungent paragraph and an employee (manager?) of the restaurant approached me while he was busing a nearby table.
"What is that you are reading?" he asked.
"It's called 'The Freedom Manifesto,' " I said, and I gave him an earful about the book, the new convert's hard-sell. He said it sounded great, and that he'd look around for it.
A few weeks later I was back in Common Roots ordering lunch and espresso at the counter. The man who asked me about the book was ringing my order up. "You're the guy who told me about 'The Freedom Manifesto,' right?"
Yeah, that's me.
"I read the book, it was great, leftist politics without the overseriousness."
Yeah, I said, I thought the same thing.
He turned to another woman behind the counter who was pulling a shot of espresso for a customer. "Hey, this is the guy who told me about that book," he said to her. She told me she had read it and enjoyed it herself. "She loved it, too," she said, indicating another employee.
I was very pleased that I was able to introduce this fantastic book to a handful of new readers. If any of you out there like the Common Roots cafe, or just want to read a very interesting book about getting free, you may want to read "The Freedom Manifesto," by Tom Hodgkinson.
I was laughing out loud at one particularly pungent paragraph and an employee (manager?) of the restaurant approached me while he was busing a nearby table.
"What is that you are reading?" he asked.
"It's called 'The Freedom Manifesto,' " I said, and I gave him an earful about the book, the new convert's hard-sell. He said it sounded great, and that he'd look around for it.
A few weeks later I was back in Common Roots ordering lunch and espresso at the counter. The man who asked me about the book was ringing my order up. "You're the guy who told me about 'The Freedom Manifesto,' right?"
Yeah, that's me.
"I read the book, it was great, leftist politics without the overseriousness."
Yeah, I said, I thought the same thing.
He turned to another woman behind the counter who was pulling a shot of espresso for a customer. "Hey, this is the guy who told me about that book," he said to her. She told me she had read it and enjoyed it herself. "She loved it, too," she said, indicating another employee.
I was very pleased that I was able to introduce this fantastic book to a handful of new readers. If any of you out there like the Common Roots cafe, or just want to read a very interesting book about getting free, you may want to read "The Freedom Manifesto," by Tom Hodgkinson.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
It's a Hustle and a Game and a Gift
A reader pasted this quote as a comment on my recent post about file-sharing.
"When someone downloads a piece of music, it's just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience. How they perceive your work changes your work. Treating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator. People who look at music as commerce don't understand that. They are talking about pieces of plastic they want to sell, packages of intellectual property. I'm not interested in selling pieces of plastic. I'm grateful that I've sold enough to have a house, take care of my kids and live decently. But that's a gift, not an entitlement. I don't want potential fans to be blocked because the choice to check out our music becomes a financial decision for them." – Jeff Tweedy
First of all, I find it beautiful that this comment was copy/pasted from another source; using someone else's words to express our own thoughts is an interesting aspect of this whole discussion. I do it all the time.
Second, I totally agree with the Tweedy quote. Music is not about selling pieces of plastic, it's about sparking a connection between people, and about giving the listener joy. When you give people joy, there's a good chance they will reward you somehow. But the exchange doesn't work as well when the artist treats their work as a product for sale, and demands a reward from the recipient.
Still, I can't help noting that Wilco gives us an awful lot of ways to buy pieces of plastic with their recordings on them! So even if Jeff Tweedy isn't interested in selling us pieces of plastic, someone in the band is, and makes them available to us to buy if we like. (I just bought "Wilco (The Album)" and I love it.) Maybe Jeff means that he's not primarily interested in selling pieces of plastic, that selling pieces of plastic is not an end, but a means of getting his music into the ears of his audience. And that downloads, paid or unpaid, are also ways to do that. If that's what he means, I'm completely in agreement.
I read an amazing book recently, called "2666", by Roberto Bolano. In one passage, Bolano describes the attitude of one of his characters, a novelist, towards his own work. The passage struck me as one of the best descriptions of what it's like to be an artist that I've ever read, especially the odd and interesting relationship between art and the commerce of art. Archimboldi, the character, writes in the day; his main job is at night, as a bouncer (or doorman) at a bar.
"Archimboldi's writing, the process of creation or the daily routine in which this process peacefully unfolded, gathered strength and something that for lack of a better word might be called confidence. This 'confidence' didn't signify the end of doubt, of course, much less that the writer believed his work had some value, because Archimboldi had a view of literature (though the word 'view' is too grand) as something divided into three compartments, each connected only tenuously to the others; in the first were the books he read and reread and considered magnificent and sometimes monstrous, like the fiction of Doblin, who was still one of his favorite authors, or Kafkas' compplete works. In the second compartment were the books of the epigones and authors he called the Horde, whom he essentially saw as his enemies. In the third compartment were his own books and his plans for future books, which he saw as a game and also a business, a game insofar as he derived pleasure from writing, a pleasure similar to that of the detective on the heels of the killer, and a business insofar as the publication of his books helped to augment, however modestly, his doorman's pay."
Making art is very little like experiencing art; I agree. And I think many artists would agree with Bolano that an artist's life is partly a hustle and partly a deeply interesting and satisfying game to play just for the joy of it.
One thing almost every artist will tell you is that making art is very time-consuming; having a full-time job is pretty much death for many artists' work, since the job leaves so little time for making art. Thus the hustle; if only to buy time in which to make art, artists often try very hard to make their art pay. We look at every paid piece of work as a way to buy the time to do more work.
"When someone downloads a piece of music, it's just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience. How they perceive your work changes your work. Treating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator. People who look at music as commerce don't understand that. They are talking about pieces of plastic they want to sell, packages of intellectual property. I'm not interested in selling pieces of plastic. I'm grateful that I've sold enough to have a house, take care of my kids and live decently. But that's a gift, not an entitlement. I don't want potential fans to be blocked because the choice to check out our music becomes a financial decision for them." – Jeff Tweedy
First of all, I find it beautiful that this comment was copy/pasted from another source; using someone else's words to express our own thoughts is an interesting aspect of this whole discussion. I do it all the time.
Second, I totally agree with the Tweedy quote. Music is not about selling pieces of plastic, it's about sparking a connection between people, and about giving the listener joy. When you give people joy, there's a good chance they will reward you somehow. But the exchange doesn't work as well when the artist treats their work as a product for sale, and demands a reward from the recipient.
Still, I can't help noting that Wilco gives us an awful lot of ways to buy pieces of plastic with their recordings on them! So even if Jeff Tweedy isn't interested in selling us pieces of plastic, someone in the band is, and makes them available to us to buy if we like. (I just bought "Wilco (The Album)" and I love it.) Maybe Jeff means that he's not primarily interested in selling pieces of plastic, that selling pieces of plastic is not an end, but a means of getting his music into the ears of his audience. And that downloads, paid or unpaid, are also ways to do that. If that's what he means, I'm completely in agreement.
I read an amazing book recently, called "2666", by Roberto Bolano. In one passage, Bolano describes the attitude of one of his characters, a novelist, towards his own work. The passage struck me as one of the best descriptions of what it's like to be an artist that I've ever read, especially the odd and interesting relationship between art and the commerce of art. Archimboldi, the character, writes in the day; his main job is at night, as a bouncer (or doorman) at a bar.
"Archimboldi's writing, the process of creation or the daily routine in which this process peacefully unfolded, gathered strength and something that for lack of a better word might be called confidence. This 'confidence' didn't signify the end of doubt, of course, much less that the writer believed his work had some value, because Archimboldi had a view of literature (though the word 'view' is too grand) as something divided into three compartments, each connected only tenuously to the others; in the first were the books he read and reread and considered magnificent and sometimes monstrous, like the fiction of Doblin, who was still one of his favorite authors, or Kafkas' compplete works. In the second compartment were the books of the epigones and authors he called the Horde, whom he essentially saw as his enemies. In the third compartment were his own books and his plans for future books, which he saw as a game and also a business, a game insofar as he derived pleasure from writing, a pleasure similar to that of the detective on the heels of the killer, and a business insofar as the publication of his books helped to augment, however modestly, his doorman's pay."
Making art is very little like experiencing art; I agree. And I think many artists would agree with Bolano that an artist's life is partly a hustle and partly a deeply interesting and satisfying game to play just for the joy of it.
One thing almost every artist will tell you is that making art is very time-consuming; having a full-time job is pretty much death for many artists' work, since the job leaves so little time for making art. Thus the hustle; if only to buy time in which to make art, artists often try very hard to make their art pay. We look at every paid piece of work as a way to buy the time to do more work.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Is File-Sharing Immoral?
I saw a really interesting and amazingly civil discussion online about the question: "Is illegally sharing music immoral?"
The link is here:
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/todays-question/archive/2009/07/is-downloading-music-illegally-the-same-as-stealing.shtml
After reading the thread I got excited about posting a comment, but my comment got super-long, so I've decided to put it here on my blogs. Several responses to the thread compared putting songs on file-sharing networks to borrowing a book from a friend or a library, and I kept thinking that this was a misleading comparison. So, that's where I launched my reply:
I don't see how anyone can honestly equate one person lending a single copy of a book to his or her friend with another person helping thousands upon thousands of strangers to make free copies of a music CD. Do you really see no difference? The difference is obvious: the book in the first example is never magically turned into thousands of copies of the same book. You can only read a book so fast, and so lending it to friends is a naturally slow and limited process. Whereas once a digital copy of a song is available, the number of copies expands exponentially. We all know that the advent of near-perfect copying has really changed the nature of sharing a work of art. I guess the problem is that it's all happened so fast that there aren't yet any generally agreed-upon standards of behavior.
The labels have brought a lot of this trouble upon themselves and us musicians by digging in their heels throughout the 90s when a creative approach to pricing and selling digital copies might have still been possible. By about 2001, when Napster was shut down, the horse was already out of the barn, and file-sharing was turned into a kind of "stick it to the man" act of bravery.
But the artists did benefit from their record sales in the past, because they got advances from record labels willing to risk the investment on possible profits later. Sure, very few artists saw royalties after these advances, but the advances were one significant way that musicicans were paid for their work. I know, because I got cash advances on even the Trip Shakespeare and Semisonic songs and albums that didn't sell. Nowadays those advances are rare and very small, and all but the very top bands and singers are seeing their incomes fall dramatically every year.
That's okay, nobody promised us we'd get rich or even make a living, but it seems self-serving for file-sharers to argue that copying and enjoying our work without paying somehow benefits us musicians.
I can see pretty clearly how it benefits the person who gets the free album, though...
Because music is fun! It brings joy and peace and inspiration to tired, discouraged and sad people! It makes lonely people feel less alone in their troubles, it gives angry people an outlet for their rage, it makes it easy to dance at parties and fall in love! These things are worth paying a little for!
I fly a lot in my work as a songwriter, and I bring my acoustic guitar on the planes with me. If I check it in as baggage, it will eventually come off the plane broken. I have learned this over and over again to my dismay. So I get on the airplane early, bring the guitar into the cabin with me and put it in an overhead bin.
On crowded flights, other passengers will see my guitar occupying two spaces in the overhead bin and complain to the flight crew. "Hey! There's a guitar here! That should go down in the hold! I can't fit my rollaboard into the overhead bin!" And sometimes the crew will then make me check the guitar into the baggage hold. And then, every 20 or so times the guitar comes back out of the plane broken.
I never make a scene at moments like this, but what I would like to say is: "This guitar has given lots and lots of people joy, and if it is broken, I'll have to spend a bunch of money to buy another one so that it can give lots of people joy! Your rollaboard is just a bag full of toiletries and clean underwear; it is only going to give you and maybe one other person joy! That's why my guitar deserves the extra spaces in the overhead bin and your rollaboard will just have to go down in the hold!" I wish I had the chutzpah to say this, but I don't. Especially because I think no one will understand what I'm saying.
Now, these outraged business travelers, who are just trying to save themselves 20 minutes of waiting for their own checked bag by stashing everything into a rollaboard, aren't intentionally trying to break my guitar. If the crew told them they could have the overhead space but the crew would have to break my guitar in two right then and there, I'm sure at least most of these passengers (not all) would say, "Oh, never mind, I'll check my rollaboard. You can leave the guitar in the overhead bin." In fact, I'd say that if they knowingly chose to have my guitar broken, it would be an immoral act; a small one, but definitely immoral.
And that's what people do in a tiny way by making our songs available to any old stranger on a file-sharing site. These file-sharings are very small acts, but they hurt the musicians a little each time. And I think people actually understand this, despite all the disingenuous arguments that file-sharing is good for musicians. I mean, give me a break, the site is called "Pirate Bay"! Everyone knows that pirates were sailors who robbed other ships!
I don't feel well-enough informed of the details of the case of the Minnesota Mom who has been fined more than a million dollars... that sounds truly terrifying, and I wonder just how many copies she would have had to give away to really add up to that amount of money. And it does seem typical of the tone-deaf way the music industry has dealt with this issue all along.
On the other hand, I wish the Minnesota Mom hadn't used as a late-breaking defense that "someone else" might have been signing onto her computer unbeknownst to her and sharing the songs. Hmmm. I think I liked the Robin Hood "stick it to the man" defense better.
As for creative commons licenses, this movement seems like a quibble, since holders of creative commons licenses are still trying to maintain control of how their work is used and copied. Why criticize copyright holders and yet still put restrictions on the use of your work? Why not put it out with no restrictions? If your song is good enough, a major corporation will steal it from you, release it, and make loads of money. Oh, but of course the sales would promote your tour. I hope touring is a big part of your new business model!
The link is here:
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/todays-question/archive/2009/07/is-downloading-music-illegally-the-same-as-stealing.shtml
After reading the thread I got excited about posting a comment, but my comment got super-long, so I've decided to put it here on my blogs. Several responses to the thread compared putting songs on file-sharing networks to borrowing a book from a friend or a library, and I kept thinking that this was a misleading comparison. So, that's where I launched my reply:
I don't see how anyone can honestly equate one person lending a single copy of a book to his or her friend with another person helping thousands upon thousands of strangers to make free copies of a music CD. Do you really see no difference? The difference is obvious: the book in the first example is never magically turned into thousands of copies of the same book. You can only read a book so fast, and so lending it to friends is a naturally slow and limited process. Whereas once a digital copy of a song is available, the number of copies expands exponentially. We all know that the advent of near-perfect copying has really changed the nature of sharing a work of art. I guess the problem is that it's all happened so fast that there aren't yet any generally agreed-upon standards of behavior.
The labels have brought a lot of this trouble upon themselves and us musicians by digging in their heels throughout the 90s when a creative approach to pricing and selling digital copies might have still been possible. By about 2001, when Napster was shut down, the horse was already out of the barn, and file-sharing was turned into a kind of "stick it to the man" act of bravery.
But the artists did benefit from their record sales in the past, because they got advances from record labels willing to risk the investment on possible profits later. Sure, very few artists saw royalties after these advances, but the advances were one significant way that musicicans were paid for their work. I know, because I got cash advances on even the Trip Shakespeare and Semisonic songs and albums that didn't sell. Nowadays those advances are rare and very small, and all but the very top bands and singers are seeing their incomes fall dramatically every year.
That's okay, nobody promised us we'd get rich or even make a living, but it seems self-serving for file-sharers to argue that copying and enjoying our work without paying somehow benefits us musicians.
I can see pretty clearly how it benefits the person who gets the free album, though...
Because music is fun! It brings joy and peace and inspiration to tired, discouraged and sad people! It makes lonely people feel less alone in their troubles, it gives angry people an outlet for their rage, it makes it easy to dance at parties and fall in love! These things are worth paying a little for!
I fly a lot in my work as a songwriter, and I bring my acoustic guitar on the planes with me. If I check it in as baggage, it will eventually come off the plane broken. I have learned this over and over again to my dismay. So I get on the airplane early, bring the guitar into the cabin with me and put it in an overhead bin.
On crowded flights, other passengers will see my guitar occupying two spaces in the overhead bin and complain to the flight crew. "Hey! There's a guitar here! That should go down in the hold! I can't fit my rollaboard into the overhead bin!" And sometimes the crew will then make me check the guitar into the baggage hold. And then, every 20 or so times the guitar comes back out of the plane broken.
I never make a scene at moments like this, but what I would like to say is: "This guitar has given lots and lots of people joy, and if it is broken, I'll have to spend a bunch of money to buy another one so that it can give lots of people joy! Your rollaboard is just a bag full of toiletries and clean underwear; it is only going to give you and maybe one other person joy! That's why my guitar deserves the extra spaces in the overhead bin and your rollaboard will just have to go down in the hold!" I wish I had the chutzpah to say this, but I don't. Especially because I think no one will understand what I'm saying.
Now, these outraged business travelers, who are just trying to save themselves 20 minutes of waiting for their own checked bag by stashing everything into a rollaboard, aren't intentionally trying to break my guitar. If the crew told them they could have the overhead space but the crew would have to break my guitar in two right then and there, I'm sure at least most of these passengers (not all) would say, "Oh, never mind, I'll check my rollaboard. You can leave the guitar in the overhead bin." In fact, I'd say that if they knowingly chose to have my guitar broken, it would be an immoral act; a small one, but definitely immoral.
And that's what people do in a tiny way by making our songs available to any old stranger on a file-sharing site. These file-sharings are very small acts, but they hurt the musicians a little each time. And I think people actually understand this, despite all the disingenuous arguments that file-sharing is good for musicians. I mean, give me a break, the site is called "Pirate Bay"! Everyone knows that pirates were sailors who robbed other ships!
I don't feel well-enough informed of the details of the case of the Minnesota Mom who has been fined more than a million dollars... that sounds truly terrifying, and I wonder just how many copies she would have had to give away to really add up to that amount of money. And it does seem typical of the tone-deaf way the music industry has dealt with this issue all along.
On the other hand, I wish the Minnesota Mom hadn't used as a late-breaking defense that "someone else" might have been signing onto her computer unbeknownst to her and sharing the songs. Hmmm. I think I liked the Robin Hood "stick it to the man" defense better.
As for creative commons licenses, this movement seems like a quibble, since holders of creative commons licenses are still trying to maintain control of how their work is used and copied. Why criticize copyright holders and yet still put restrictions on the use of your work? Why not put it out with no restrictions? If your song is good enough, a major corporation will steal it from you, release it, and make loads of money. Oh, but of course the sales would promote your tour. I hope touring is a big part of your new business model!
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Dan Wilson in Athens
Click here to see the MAD TV Video Music Awards clip
I went to Greece two weeks ago to perform on the MAD TV Video Music Awards. It was really fun, performing with me were the backing band of the Greek singer Stavros Dadoush. Afterwards at the side of the stage, the vibes player, Vaggelis Paraskevaidis, played some hot jazz on the vibes before the stage crew shooshed us down to our dressing rooms.
My friends were amazed at the number of whirling, whooshing crane shots in the clip. Mike Doughty told me I was lucky the producers let me stand on the stage, as they could have fit an extra crane where I was standing. I say the slight feelings of motion sickness are worth the fun.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Who is the Author and why isn't the drummer getting paid?
Been thinking about collaboration in my own musical world and other types of art, too. What is the relationship between the idea of a "sole author" and the real process of making art? Is the heroic solo author just a figurehead we need so that we can refer to the art and imagine that it comes from one body?
From the inside, I am more and more aware that any good piece of music I am involved with turns out to be a collaboration, even the stuff I once would have called "solo" work. Even if just one person writes a song, there still may be 6 musicians performing the song, a producer and two engineers recording the song, a mixer and a mastering engineer creating the final sound of the song, a kitchen cabinet of friends and spouse and peers telling the singer whether it's good enough to release, etc, etc. Pretty quickly, you're up to 12 specialists and at least a few trusted sets of ears afterwards.
And this is the case for almost all the music we think of as the work of a single artist - Bon Iver perhaps an exception to this, but he's the rare one.
But the thing I'm thinking of is that even in the visual art I go to see, the work is often a site-specific collaboration between artists and venue - an artist or two flies into town, looks at a room/park/building/atrium, gathers up some fabricators/engineers/collaborators, and when they leave town they leave behind them a cool piece of conversation fuel on tap for the public.
Even though these works are promoted to us as solo artworks, they're no less collaborative than the songs I get involved in.
So why do we still need the heroic solo author in the press materials and on the outside wall of the musuem? Is it just because a group photo is a mess? Is it because we need a figurehead just in order to talk about the art or music?
I am wondering whether our mental picture of how art and music are made are going to catch up to this reality or whether we'll always need that figurehead.
Last night I went out to a show - a friend of mine, Sara Watkins, came to Minneapolis, taught her songs to the band Romantica, and they played them together at the Ritz. I found it to be very inspiring and beautiful just as music, but even more than that I was fascinated by Romantica's willingness to let their "identity" as a band flex. They temporarily absorbed elements of Sara's vision and vice versa and the night was more exciting for it. I know this isn't a new practice, but it seems to be happening a lot among the musicians I know.
Here's another comment on the question of authorship: the biggest unacknowledged travesty in crediting and payment of royalties in music is that drummers are not paid royalties on the tracks they record. I think that most great rock songs boil down to being a great duet between the singer and the drummer. The feel that the drummer brings to the recording is almost the whole thing. But the way the payment is structured is that the singer gets royalties on sales of the recording, being the "artist." Drummers of the world, unite! It's time to get paid for your ideas, before that idea competely bites the dust.
From the inside, I am more and more aware that any good piece of music I am involved with turns out to be a collaboration, even the stuff I once would have called "solo" work. Even if just one person writes a song, there still may be 6 musicians performing the song, a producer and two engineers recording the song, a mixer and a mastering engineer creating the final sound of the song, a kitchen cabinet of friends and spouse and peers telling the singer whether it's good enough to release, etc, etc. Pretty quickly, you're up to 12 specialists and at least a few trusted sets of ears afterwards.
And this is the case for almost all the music we think of as the work of a single artist - Bon Iver perhaps an exception to this, but he's the rare one.
But the thing I'm thinking of is that even in the visual art I go to see, the work is often a site-specific collaboration between artists and venue - an artist or two flies into town, looks at a room/park/building/atrium, gathers up some fabricators/engineers/collaborators, and when they leave town they leave behind them a cool piece of conversation fuel on tap for the public.
Even though these works are promoted to us as solo artworks, they're no less collaborative than the songs I get involved in.
So why do we still need the heroic solo author in the press materials and on the outside wall of the musuem? Is it just because a group photo is a mess? Is it because we need a figurehead just in order to talk about the art or music?
I am wondering whether our mental picture of how art and music are made are going to catch up to this reality or whether we'll always need that figurehead.
Last night I went out to a show - a friend of mine, Sara Watkins, came to Minneapolis, taught her songs to the band Romantica, and they played them together at the Ritz. I found it to be very inspiring and beautiful just as music, but even more than that I was fascinated by Romantica's willingness to let their "identity" as a band flex. They temporarily absorbed elements of Sara's vision and vice versa and the night was more exciting for it. I know this isn't a new practice, but it seems to be happening a lot among the musicians I know.
Here's another comment on the question of authorship: the biggest unacknowledged travesty in crediting and payment of royalties in music is that drummers are not paid royalties on the tracks they record. I think that most great rock songs boil down to being a great duet between the singer and the drummer. The feel that the drummer brings to the recording is almost the whole thing. But the way the payment is structured is that the singer gets royalties on sales of the recording, being the "artist." Drummers of the world, unite! It's time to get paid for your ideas, before that idea competely bites the dust.
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