The video for my song 'Wag the Wonderbitch' was made by Jay Sillence. I've not watched it since the year it came out. 2014. At that time I was in an extremely outwardly creative period of my life. I was three quarters of the way into my 52 project - a weekly songwriting escapade that resulted in a song (or finished* piece of music) every week of 2014 (so a 52 song album - your maths are correct). And simultaneously, I was recording an album called 'Down There For Dancing'.
That sentence is not wholly accurate. It would be more accurate to say I was RErecording an album called 'Down There For Dancing'.
Still not the entire truth. It would, in fact, being even MORE accurate to say I was rerecording an album called 'Down There For Dancing' for the eleventh (11th!) time. So... adjustment of maths... The original version, the 11 rerecordings and the eventual Granfalloon debut album (that's correct, this wasn't the final rerecording)... that makes 13 times that I made the album 'Down There For Dancing'.
The shifting form of this album was elusive to me. I couldn't nail it down. But more than that. When I felt I had gotten it 'wrong' I felt like I had failed. This feeling of failure would lead me to try and erase that failure; to scrub out my history in an effort to start fresh and try once again to capture this slippery fish. I would record the album, release the album, tour the album... and then destroy the album. I'd attempt to remove it from existence. And from The Internet**. This last crime has put me on a lot of online reviewers' Shitlists as when one attempts to remove a recorded album of music from the world*** it also puts any reference to it, to the singles released, the videos made as part of those single campaigns, and to any reviews of those videos made as part of those single campaigns out of context.
The nature of the music industry was (and is still) not in aligment with my nature. To this day, popular music favours the New... the Emerging... the Revolutionary. So much weight is put on introductions... on a concise and easy to digest narrative... we need to be able to fit any artist we discover into our own narrative after all.
To say I've always struggled with this is an understatement and it's only recently that I've begun to come to terms with it, and the idea that there is Another Way. It is, after all, only recently that I've read Malcom Gladwell's thoughts on The Two Kinds Of Artist. The Picasso (the Revoltionary - the New mind wielding ideas like a knife, immediately cocksure of their intent and their art), and the Cezanne.
The Cezanne takes time. They introduce ideas without any certainty of the fruits of that idea. They sketch. They develop. They erase. Try again. Erase again. Try again. And again. And again. They chip away at the block of marble without the concept of what the marble will become but they have the sense**** which chips feel right and which feel wrong.
Suffice to say, the music industry does not really cater for Cezannes. But my lack of knowledge of this alternative form of artist instilled in me a great anxiety and feeling of wrongness in myself. And my scrubbing of my past in an effort to keep my narrative 'digestable' has led to me erasing huge chunks of my own life. Mentally it's not been a healthy path and I'm attempting to reclaim some of that now.
Thankfully I've found a way now to reintroduce parts of my past, piece by piece. So here's another piece of that. This is a video for the song Wag the Wonderbitch. A wonderfully sweet love story between two Omnichords featuring the only Omnichord sex scene in existence*****.
I just watched in this morning for the first time in 7 years and I love it. It's a part of me. A part of my history and who I am. Enjoy.
You can hear the 12th and 13th versions of 'Down There For Dancing' by subscribing to my Bandcamp at https://granfalloonmusic.bandcamp.com/subscribe
*abandoned - for the time being
**though intertwined I will always think of The Internet and existence seperate though I also agree with the Vonnegut adage that things are what pretend to be. I hold a lot of contradicting opions.
***or The Internet
**** though not always immediately, they are Cezannes after all
*****prove me wrong
Thank you for your detailed and lengthy response Richard. I appreciate you taking the time to share and explain your thoughts and feelings about this issue. I cannot imagine the struggles you and many indie musicians go through in order to get your music heard. That's one reason I like to write about artists like yourself. And you're right, of course, about the music industry being infected by a fetishisation of youth. Even major artists who've sold millions of records seem to have an early expiration date.
Touching on another point you made, I've had a few artists and bands tell me that it was their 'new' management companies or labels who recommended that they delete some of their previously…
As a blogger who writes music reviews, it's extremely frustrating when artists or bands later delete music I previously spent my precious time reviewing. This has happened to me too many times to count. I realize the mercurial and insecurities of many artists lead to some of them later reassessing their works and deciding they weren't up to their desired level of quality, but after someone's written a positive review of that music, to later trash it is really extreme and counter-productive in my opinion.