Me old band
As part of my ongoing obligatory mid-life crisis — and as a service to the few people who might care — I've been working on getting all the tracks recorded by my old band available for download. Well, it's finally accomplished, and you can sample and download everything from Stinging Rain's three recordings over at CD Baby. The best place to start is to go to our main page over there. And as of today it's all available on iTunes as well.
I also started an "unofficial blog" a couple months back just to kind of "get the ball rolling", at least in my own mind. I also wanted to try to get our Google rating up and see who's hitting us. The blog has pertinent links and photos from the old days PLUS my usual attempts at humor, all music-related. There's also a post about what it takes to get major digital download coverage, but I'm too lazy to find that link for you now. Suffice it to say it's pretty easy; all you need is $55 and a Sunday afternoon. CD Baby takes care of everything else.
It's been pretty cool "reliving" some of those wild and heady days. This thing was a significant part of my life at one point, and when we called it quits in 1993, we pretty much dropped everything like firefighters hearing a siren and dispersed to go pursue other agendas. Aside from the rumors, nobody even knew we had called it quits for months; we never officially sent out a mailing to our fan base (What do you say? "Hey, we quit! Yeah, we're losers. Thanks for the memories.")
At least once a year, the lead singer and my closest friend, Nate, gets several calls for a CD or two. And we do get Googled sporadically as I've recently learned. So it's nice that we can say the stuff is available now and will be really forever, or until someone decides they don't want to make a few pennies a year from our download sales. In the digital age, "shelf space" gets cheaper every month, so you don't really have to convince Mr. Havana Smoker that your stuff is going to fly off his shelves rather than sit and collect dust and cobwebs in his warehouse.
Another cool thing is that you can listen to 2 minutes of all 26 recordings over at CD Baby. I had the option of making all, none or some of the tunes available for sampling and I went for maximum exposure. So if it's not your bag, no skin off your butt. It isn't the best rock ever created, but I don't think it's the worst either and we turned a few original hooks.
Oh, yeah, one last site. You can hear three entire songs on our Purevolume page, one from each album.
Hi Pauli,
ReplyDeleteI just wanted to say I bought all three of the albums and I really enjoy them. I will add some songs from Stinging Rain (and other stuff too) to my radio station as soon as I'm feeling halfway decent again. I'm been really sick the past few days -- this cold has been going around at work and it finally got me.
Susan, thank you so much. You are definitely our greatest "new fan". No rush on the airplay, please get better and take care of important stuff first.
ReplyDeleteIs that your picture? What instrument did you play? Was it a Christian band?
ReplyDeleteI went to the site and I think I answered my question. You played the Bass. I had to do the "respectively" thing. I hope I line it all up correctly.
ReplyDeleteYou have a nice sound. I am thinking Bono with your lead singer. Infinite shelf space is the beauty of the long tail.
One of the best blue guitarists I've heard is trying to make a living doing construction or something right now. It is a tough business.
That is me at about 23 years of age with a '76 Fender precision fretless bass and hair. I still have the Fender, not the hair. In addition to playing the bass, I did backing vocals and some keyboards.
ReplyDeleteWe were *kind* of a Christian band, but we didn't want the label. At the same time we never denied we were Christians and that a lot of our material was about faith. But face it -- a lot of Christian music bites, esp. "CCM". We became semi-active in the "Alt. Christian" market; we played at the Cornerstone festival one year, for example. We knew the folks from Over the Rhine and Innocence Mission who had similar approaches. You can check out our lyrics here. A lot of them are very Christian.
BTW, just got the Innocence Mission's children's album. Very good. My 4-year-old still likes Blue Oyster Cult better, though. He was singing "Godzilla" earlier this morning.
It is a tough business.
ReplyDeleteYeah, and touring is like being married.
F*%$en A!
ReplyDeleteI should clarify that being married is a *much* better "deal" than being in a band, but the low points of being in a band can be almost as low as those in marriage, and good music doesn't always make up for it.
ReplyDelete