Welcome to the Sea of Echoes

I’ve been looking at myspace the last couple of days to look for bands to play shows with and I’ve discovered that the number of local acts is staggering.  For example, doing a search for ‘alternative’ bands in a 50-mile radius of my home gives about 10,000 search results.  It’s interesting to look at these in terms of how influential bands are.  One measure of this is the number of times a song has been played on myspace.  Let’s have a look at some of these bands:

#1555: Simsalabim - 1.4k plays, 1k views, 61 fans, ~100 days.

This means we generated less than 1 fan per day, much less since many of our ‘fans’ are simply other bands.  We’ve had about 10 visits to the site each day.  Also only about 40% of the visits to the site result in multiple plays.

#600: The number fox 5k plays, 4k views, 161 fans

We’re playing the OSF festival with these guys in a couple of weeks.  Mostly in the high-school/jc scene.  Seems like their fans are fairly real, but most visitors didn’t listen to many songs.

#55: Picture Atlantic: 71k plays, 38k views, 4k fans, on for 500 days. 

High school band with high-school friends and a bunch of random myspace tramps.  They need to be getting about 80 hits per day, but they are playing 3 shows a week and their EP has been out for almost a year, so sounds like it could be real.

#11 Strata - 600k plays, 400k views, 43k fans, 3.5 years online.

Nationally touring act with radio play on live 105.  They are also getting about 1.5 plays per view, and about 10 views per fan over the lifetime of their site.

#1 Counting Crows -5M plays, 2.3M views, 64k fans. 

Nationally known artists, with a higher number of plays per visit to the site.  Their site has only been up a little while and their number of fans isn’t that large - they are supposedly getting 100 plays per fan!  I wondering if they are hacking the myspace stats…

Even more importantly, I need to ask where on this continuum I want to be.  Being a nationally touring act is out for me, and even the number of shows that Picture Atlantic is playing seems like kind of a drag.  Maybe if we got to be in the top 100 most influential alternative bands in the bay area that would be enough to give us steady gigs.  We’d probably need about 500-1000 die hard fans to get us enough of a following to gig steadily in any given area.  If we get 10 people to like us at each show, we’d need to play 50-100 shows to create this kind of a base.

We spent the first half of class on reading our bios.  It was good to hear what other people had to say about their role models.  I was especially impressed by how many people choose a parent.

After that we started several exercises on play - little schoolyard games almost that tried to get us to let down our guard a little.  The games were physical and fun.  The most interesting was a game where we had to secretly copy someone’s motions without being caught.

At one point we did an exercise where we were supposed to show someone that we were happy to see them, and I had a hard time showing genuine happiness physically.  In fact, I feel like I have a very hard time expressing myself without words compared to the other students.  This was true in the physical exercise.  This is something to watch for and to work on.

Later on I improvised a birthday scene with Lili.  I can remember feeling awkward and self conscious about my body language in an every day situation.  I also admired people who were more creative and off the wall in improvisational story telling.  People came up with scenarios like ‘its both of our birthdays’ and ‘i brought you a cat’ which were good comic relief.

I think the main thing to focus on is this feeling of holding back and not being spontaneous, open and inviting.  It’s really driven from the fear of being judged, but that is so hard to let go of…

For today’s assignment we were asked to pick a role model and write a short biography about the person.

I was suprised how difficult this task was for me.  I remember even a few years ago how I used to have so many role models in different areas of achievement.  I would look up to Richard Feynman or Einstein for their intelligence, or Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan for physical abilities.  I looked up to Bill Gates for his business achievements.

It says something about my stage of life that I don’t really think in terms of these role models any more.  I don’t really strive to achieve success the way it is traditionally defined in terms of strength, wealth, or intellect.  Maybe it’s because I’ve achieved most of what I can expect to achieve in these areas, and for the most part it is enough.

I have to admit that I have had role models that replaced these.  They are mostly musicians and songwriters who can translate feelings into words and music - Vienna Teng, John Mayer, Sarah McLaughlin, Sting, Lijie.  What I admire about them is their musicianship, in some cases their voices, and their ability to create such beauty and powerful feelings out of thin air.

Still it is hard to really call them role models, because when I take a close look at the life of a professional musician, I have to say that it seems like a terrible way to live.  Every day travelling to a different city getting on stage in front of strangers (if anyone bothered to come to the show at all), and playing the same set of ten or fifteen songs, trying to build a following and make enough of a living to be able to stay on the road.  It seems better to keep your day job and approach music and a wonderful pastime.

I recently went to the Sick Puppies show at Slims, though, and I think that my perspective on this is starting to change.  Their performance was so tight and their sound was so crystal that I realized how far my band has to go.  In particular, the bassist Emma Anzai totally shredded and I watched in amazement at how good she was.  It would take a ton of practice for me to reach that level, if I ever could, and in the process I would be paid almost nothing.  And yet that achievement would mean so much more to me than getting the next high-tech job or even being the CEO of a company.

This quarter I decided to take an acting class to help with the band and also to explore the range of emotion and expression that I use in daily life.  During last quarter’s leadership seminar, several people complained that I was a little to cerebral and held back a lot, so I figured that acting might help with this.  A long time ago someone told me that acting was a way to understand life and what it means to be human.  Coming from such a strong background of science and engineering, this is perhaps the very thing that I need to study.

Our first assignment was to bring a poem or lyric and recite it to the class.  We took turns and as I watched the first few people I was struck by how they each took a few minutes to introduce their piece and then their tone changed totally when they went into performer mode.  The afterward the instructor asked a few questions and again they were fairly relaxed and natural.  I decided to try to avoid this, thinking that the performance should start from the moment you enter the stage.  I walked up in front of the class and stood there a momement silently.  At one point I couldn’t resist saying ‘give me a moment’, but in general I think it had the effect I wanted.

The work I chose was the first verse from the Indigo Girls’ song ‘Ghost’:

 There’s a letter on the desktop that I dug out of a drawer

The last truce we ever came to in our adolecent war

And i start to feel a fever from the warm air through the screen

You come gradual like seasons shaowing my dreams

And there’s not enough room in this world for my pain

Signals crossed and love gets lost and time passed makes it plain

Of all my demon spirits, I need you the most

Im in love with your ghost 

Standing there in front of everyone I made a deliberate attempt to make eye contact, which helped engage the audience, but took a little drama away from the work because the words are addressed to a single person - in fact a person who is not present at all.  I took the time between lines to make sure I could let the feeling of the words sink in, and I could feel my voice trembling a little bit, but I wasn’t sure if it was from the poem, or from the nervousness I felt in front of everyone.  Throughout the reading I stood there with hands in pockets in a protective rigid stance, which sort of matched the mood I was going for.  In contrast to the other people who used a lot of gestures and talked with their hands, I don’t think I was that engaging.

Afterward the Florentina asked me about the meaning of the lines and I resisted telling the story behind them.  I didn’t tell her about how songs have the power to show us who we really are, and to awaken parts of us that have been deeply buried.  I didn’t tell the story about how this song brought me away from the world of industry and into the strange and uncertain world of art.  I didn’t tell her about how this song summed up for me all the loss that I felt from an earlier time in my life.

Years have passed since I first heard this song and since I began the journey that it has set me on, and the feelings are not as strong as they once were.  Now it seems I have a chance to redeem myself and fix what was once broken, and yet I shy away from this chance, partly out of fear, or bitterness, or lack of hope.  Reflecting on the song at this later time I realize that it is so much easier to be in love with a ghost than a person, and perhaps I am just choosing something which is easy.