This can be either very inspir­ing, or very depress­ing for the strug­gling band. I won’t go into the his­tory of record sale cer­ti­fi­ca­tion here, I’m just inter­ested in giv­ing a sense of scale of record sales. The Wikipedia page has a good run­down on the par­tic­u­lars of cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for the curi­ous. These num­bers come from the RIAA’s web­site, the Wikipedia’s List of Best Sell­ing Records.

There is this qual­ity that runs through Cana­dian music that I would sum up as being lyri­cally dense. When you lis­ten to likes of The Weak­erthans, or Joni Mitchell or Gord Downie, we don’t shy away from the com­pli­cated turns of phrase. When it comes to writ­ing songs that have some­thing to say, Amelia Cur­ran (Six Shooter Records) is well worth the lis­ten. She cer­tainly knows how to use words to craft nar­ra­tives which punch you in your emo­tional cen­tre. I’ve heard she’s been likened to the female Leonard Cohen, of which oth­ers include: Felic­ity Buirski, Suzanne Vega, and Fiona Apple. This is not sur­pris­ing since her song the ‘The Dozens’ sounds much like a pas­tiche of ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’. But beyond that, her songs are deliv­ered with a smoky sen­su­al­ity twinged with a world-weary out­look, as though the speaker knows how all rela­tion­ships end … badly. Her live per­for­mances (cour­tesy of Youtube) are done in a mel­low finger-picking style and inti­mate demeanor wor­thy of a red vel­vet lounge. Go and visit Amelia’s site and lis­ten to her music there.

While it’s tempt­ing to think of audio record­ing as start­ing with Edi­son and his phono­graph in 1877, the truth is that record­ing had been hap­pen­ing for 20 years longer than that. If we dis­count devices to play­back pre-recorded music (musicboxes, orchestri­ons) or sim­u­lated speech (Wolf­gang von Kempelen’s speak­ing machine) the first record­ing, as we come to know it today, was done in 1857. It was Édouard-Léon Scott who invented the phonoau­to­graph, a device that recorded sound-waves on to a soot-covered glass plate. For many years it remained a labra­tory curios­ity; a device for the study of sound and lit­tle else. It wasn’t until Edison’s improved ver­sion, of basi­cally the same prin­ci­ple, that sound record­ing became a com­mer­cially viable ven­ture. Even then, Edi­son and oth­ers went after the busi­ness mar­ket, hock­ing their recorders as dic­tion machines for the busi­ness pro­fes­sional. Few would have thought at the time that an entire indus­try would rise from this early exper­i­ment in cap­tur­ing sound. Fewer still would have fore­told that the fur­ther pro­lif­er­a­tion of record­ing tech­nol­ogy to the masses would spell that industry’s downfall.

Go to the First Sounds web­site to delve into early audio recordings.

I am con­stantly jot­ting down lines on any scrap that I can get my hands on, receipts, envelopes, nap­kins. My pock­ets would be stuffed with gems, which I would invari­ably lose. To rem­edy the dis­si­pa­tion of my for­tune I invested in a cheap memo-pad. True I could have sprung for a mole­sk­ine. I’ve used them before and quite enjoy the pre­ten­sion, but I can’t really afford that vel­vety smooth pre­ten­sion right now. A cheap memo-pad is a frac­tion of the cost, and in the end, it’s not the paper you use that makes your words great.

I used to write out lyrics in a spi­ral bound note­book, or loose leaf in a binder. When faced with the giant expanse of a page, I used to start writ­ing, first verse, refrain, sec­ond verse, third and so on. It was all very orderly and very dif­fi­cult. If things didn’t fit, it was hard for me to rework them. Occa­sion­ally I would draw arrows to show that some pas­sages should be swapped, or I may have squeezed in a new line under­neath an old one. The fact that I had this one big space that would fill up with words leav­ing pre­cious lit­tle areas on the page for doing rewrites, cou­pled with the lack of abil­ity to eas­ily shift around blocks of text meant that often when the lyrics stopped work­ing, I’d throw the baby out with the bath­wa­ter.

What I’ve found now, is that com­pared to my days of loose-leaf, I’ve started using a very non-linear writ­ing process. Now lyrics come together like a patch­work quilt. That’s not to say that they are hap­haz­ardly strung together, it is still impor­tant to keep the big pic­ture of theme and nar­ra­tive in mind, but rather that the pieces of the lyri­cal whole are put in the places they belong. Reduc­ing my writ­ing area to a space that is 3 by 5 inches has given me great lat­i­tude in the con­struc­tion of a song. I can gen­er­ate many phrases know­ing that I’ll find a place for the ones that fit and eas­ily dis­card the ones that don’t. Even then, the dis­carded writ­ing may find a place in another work, with just a lit­tle alteration.

One more thing, it occurs to me to men­tion that there is a good rea­son not to splurge for the expen­sive note­books. I find that I’m more unwill­ing to sully an expen­sive note­book with bad writ­ing. This may sound like a good way to pro­voke good writ­ing, but all it does is paral­yse and dis­suade risk tak­ing. Good writ­ing doesn’t come about from some divine pen­stroke that has been fully planned before­hand. If one had to wait for only the really good stuff to bur­ble up before com­mit­ting any­thing to paper noth­ing would get done. Good writ­ing is the result of quan­tity minus the bad stuff. It’s more impor­tant to be a good edi­tor than an inspired writer.

It’s no secret that music can effect us in pro­found ways. Often we expe­ri­ence all sorts of phys­i­o­log­i­cal changes, par­tic­u­larly relat­ing to mood. I’ve won­dered if it were pos­si­ble to map out the responses to var­i­ous melodic struc­ture in order to write super-affective songs. Three researchers (Grewe, Kopiez, Alten­müllera) have put forth a paper detail­ing their research in pro­vok­ing chills. Though the paper is not on music’s abil­ity to induce chills  (which is a given) but rather on chills as an indi­ca­tor of emo­tional peaks, it is still inter­est­ing to know that our emo­tional response to music can be so out­wardly indi­cated.
Pre­vi­ous stud­ies demon­strated that chills can
be repeated in response to the same musi­cal
event over sev­eral days in one indi­vid­ual.
How­ever, they can­not be trig­gered reli­ably in
dif­fer­ent indi­vid­u­als in response to the same
musi­cal stim­u­lus.
Shout out to Mind​hacks​.com for point­ing out the paper to me which you can read here.

Whilst get­ting the tem­plate designed for Euphonic Remarks’ new home, I did much pok­ing around for design inspi­ra­tion. If you’re try­ing to pro­mote your­self in the music world these days, a web­site is a MUST. So I thought some of the pages I found could be use­ful to you when you’re putting up your ultra-snazzy, band pro­mot­ing, mega site. Feel free to steal ideas ya bunch of pirates!

35 inspir­ing music site designs

… and 30 more

… and still 30 more beau­ti­ful music web­site designs

… and 10 well designed band websites.

Yet more band site inspiration.

30 totally cool band posters.

25 seri­ously artis­tic band posters.

69 stun­ning gig posters.

16 bad ass band posters.

A plethora of gig posters.

Pho­to­shop tuto­r­ial on design­ing a band site.

Grunge band site layout.

Cre­ate a band web­site in flash.

Flash tem­plates for music sites.

Cre­ate a killer band site in Drupal.

Rock-n-Roll design and hosting.