Jeff Jarvis says that every minute 10 hours of video is posted on YouTube.  Wow. Hopefully you find his observations about the massive amount of internet-fueled creativity as interesting as I do:

This has surely always been the case. The internet doesn’t make us more creative, I don’t think. But it does enable what we create to be seen, heard, and used. It enables every creator to find a public, the public he or she merits. And that takes creation out of the proprietary hands of the supposed creative class.

It got me thinking that for all the music that I’ve been writing and performing since my first preschool piano recital, I feel more creative now than ever.  I’m sure that’s in part because the barrier to pushing stuff out to the world has become incredibly small.  Now if I could only finish and post some of the stuff I’ve been working on…

Which reminds me that I wanted to talk about the copyright on this web site.

My album of original music, downtime is available on iTunes, Amazon, Napster and CDBaby and I always have a copy or two available at my shows.  You should totally buy it.  The CD artwork is sweet and the music files are of higher quality than those available for download here.  Someday soon I’ll have another album available that includes the WIP on this site.  Hopefully it will be compelling enough that you’ll want to buy it, too.

That said, I really hope that you like the music enough to share it.  As such, I have licensed all of my posted original music and lyrics via Creative Commons.  I use the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License, which means that you can download for noncommercial use, provided you give proper attribution and share any work derived from it under the same license.  If you would like to use the recordings for commercial reasons or have any questions about the copyrighted material on this site, contact me.

As for YouTube?  Yeah, I hope to contribute my own hours of online video someday soon.  In the meantime (and in the spirit of Jeff’s post), check out this sweet animation for the Violent Femmes Country Death Song.  Enjoy.

Here’s a new sketch of Nothing Left to Lose with the Telecaster.  I didn’t capture the exact guitar sound I wanted, but it’s close:

Nothing Left to Lose – Electric

Here’s the more produced acoustic version for comparison’s sake:

Nothing Left to Lose – Acoustic

Ideally I could get this to the point where it sounds as stark and beautiful as the Up to the Mountain arrangement Patty Griffin used the last time I saw her in concert.  It was the highlight of the show for me.  Here’s a recording somebody posted on YouTube:

Patty Griffin - Up to the Mountain

I think I need to be a better guitar player to make this work.  And a better singer.  And a better songwriter…  **Sigh**  Patty Griffin is so lovely.  🙂

Neko Case is the love of my life.  She will be, anyway, if we ever get to meet.  When she sold out Bimbo’s four nights in a row, I went to every show.  I was totally going to stalk her until I saw this guy’s post and realized what a rank amateur I am when it comes to obsession.

It’s an easy bet that I have listened to Neko’s latest, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, more times than she has (that’s the nature of art).  It is a gorgeous piece of work that I find hard to describe, but can’t put down.  It’s filled with quirky little songs that defy conventional songwriting structure – lacking choruses and repeated hooks – but I find myself singing along to.  I’m a fan of big, strong voices, and Neko’s is the biggest and the strongest.  I also love a lot of reverb and the production of all of Neko’s solo work revolves on big, beautiful, echo’y sound.  She surrounds herself with some great musicians, including Kelly Hogan who I’ve followed since her Atlanta, Jody Grind days.  “Country noir”?  “Alt-country”? “Southern Gothic”?  I don’t really know what adjective applies other than “beautiful”.

I love her other albums as well.  I can listen to Look for Me, I’ll Be Around, the Sarah Vaughan cover from Neko’s Blacklisted, over and over and over again.  My sister and I did the best we could to cover:

Kim Meador – Look For Me, I’ll Be Around (Faster, Acoustic take here)

I think there’s a new Neko album on the way.  I can’t wait.

Here’s some songs off of Fox Confessor:

Margaret vs. Pauline
Hold On, Hold On
That Teenage Feeling
Maybe Sparrow

And here’s a couple of bonus songs from other albums:

Favorite
No Need To Cry

I don’t feel music like I used to.  In high school and college I would get albums that I would listen to over and over and over and over again.  Stuff by Lyle Lovett and Cowboy Junkies and Dwight Yoakam and Chris Isaak and whoever else really grabbed me wound up in high rotation for months before I even thought about listening to something else.

But as an adult, that doesn’t happen to me that much any more.  I have a lot of theories for it:

• Too many albums at my disposal
• More discriminating
• Not enough time to absorb new material

Daniel J. Levitin has a better theory in This Is Your Brain on Music (great book!).  I’m paraphrasing, but one of the points he makes is that teenagers’  brains are better wired to be overcome by the effect of music – to really feel the sound in a way that adults can’t.

I would buy into that theory except for the fact that occasionally an album comes along that I play all day, every single day, for months on end.  Firecracker – So Long Someday is one of those albums.

I picked up So Long Someday after finding out that a Rhett Miller song was on the album.  The music is right up my alley – pop/rock songs above love lost with a little grit thrown in on the side and some great lead guitar work.  Scout, the lead singer and songwriter, has an appealing voice, his lyrics are heartfelt, and the sound crafted on this recording is soothing.

The sad thing about all this is that these guys are local and were playing gigs right down the block at the Hotel Utah.  By the time I became transfixed by this album, I only caught a few acoustic gigs before they seemed to disappear.  I still hold out hope that Scout or the band will resurface in some form somewhere in the City.

Note to self – go see more local, live music so that I don’t make this mistake again.

This one is probably the most polished of the new batch of songs.  I introduced a recent performance of it with the fact that I’m from the South and a lot of my songs have some twang in them.  After I finished playing, somebody said to me "nah, man, not too much twang at all."

As if twang was a bad thing.

So when you listen to this one, close your eyes and see if you can hear some heavy pedal steel guitar in the background.  That’s how I hear it when I play it.

Further to Fall

FYI – the tag line for this blog is "a blog sometimes about music."

Apparently centuries of Australian breeding didn’t teach my Mom’s Blue Heeler, Cheyenne, that she shouldn’t go sticking her nose around things that rattle.  At the ranch this past weekend she took a bite from a North American rattlesnake and lived to tell about it.  There’s Cheyenne in better days to the right…

That’s not my story.

While talking about Cheyenne’s pitiful state, my Mom dropped this gem about my grandfather, Bliss Wilson.  Papaw did not like snakes at all, though his job as a soil conservationist in rural Oklahoma probably kept him in close proximity to them.  One day, on a drive back from fishing at the farm, he and Mamaw heard a loud buzzing in the pickup.  My grandfather, thinking it was a rattler, jumped out of the moving truck while it was still in gear, leaving my grandmother to fend for herself as it rolled to a stop.

Ultimately the sound was snagged fishing line being pulled through a reel.  No harm no foul I guess, but my grandmother still hasn’t forgiven Papaw for leaving her in a moving truck that he thought had a rattlesnake in it!

#1 on my list of things to record when I get the time is another version of Broken Wings.  The emotive quality of this song makes it really fun to play, but I can’t seem to capture a recording that sounds like what I’m hearing.  I specifically asked for opinions on this song the last time I played it live at the Bazaar and got a thumbs up, but maybe folks were just being nice?  Judge for yourself – here’s the latest acoustic recording:

Broken Wings

I originally wrote this on the telecaster with a real dirty, bluesy electric guitar part.  Maybe that’s what’s missing?  Or maybe it needs another stanza?  Or a really good bridge?  More to come…

I started a personal blog this week.  Theoretically it’s now tied to my Facebook profile, which means there’s a chance someone might actually read it.  Here’s what this thing is all about…

I needed a new web site (Brad Meador) to support my music habit and it had to have a simple way to post gigs and new material.  I’m no stranger to blogging, so a personal, music-focused blog seemed way to go.  The result is downtime.  If you use an RSS\Feed Reader you can subscribe here.  If you have no idea what that means, sign up for email updates here.

In addition to upcoming gigs and new music I’m working on, I’m likely to post about albums I really like (does the term "album" date me?), some great concerts, and anything else that captures my attention.  So, instead of sending you emails like "OMG I have listened to Greg Garing’s Dream Too Real to Hold 20 times today and can’t stop" or "I had no idea Kathleen Edwards could rock until I saw her at the Independent last night" I’ll just post that stuff here.

I also have some crazy notion that writing a little bit about music will help me clarify thoughts, stimulate creativity, and maybe – just maybe – make me a better songwriter and performer.  I guess that all remains to be seen.

On a final note, why did I name the blog downtime?  First, that’s the name of my album; a collection of largely melancholic songs recorded while between jobs.  Second, most of the stuff I listen to and perform tends towards tales of heartbreak – what I consider to be a very liberal definition of the blues (see About Brad Meador).  Finally, music remains my primary hobby, something I do to relax.  Downtime.  Perfect, right?

I’ll be posting upcoming gigs on the blog.  If you’re interested in following just the gigs and not the rest of the blog, you have two choices – sign up on my mailing list or subscribe to get only the gig posts in your feed reader of choice.  If you’ve gotten email from me about new shows in the past, you’re already on the mailing list.  If you want to switch to the reader, let me know.

And yeah, there’s not an upcoming show on the calendar right now because I’m really really busy with the day job.  That said, I try to make it to the Bazaar Cafe every Thursday for open mic.  It’s all acoustic, all original music.  Robin Galante is a great host and the performers are usually awesome.  So stop by sometime.

I wrote this one a while ago – right after I completed downtime – but put it away for a while (explanation below).  Picture a rocking Old 97s-type arrangement (blistering telecaster and driving, shuffling drums) when you listen:

Gwendolyn

So I submitted this to Nashville Songwriters Association for a song evaluation right after I wrote it.  As part of your membership, the NSAI allows you to send in a tape of your compositions.  A “professional” will listen to the song, record their thoughts on the tape and send it back.  All in all it’s a great service and one of the main reasons to pay your dues.  When I first completed this one I was a member and dashed off a recording of the song, anxious to get feedback.  When the tape came back, the reviewer said it was the worst song he’d heard all day.

It was then that I realized I wasn’t mature enough to handle criticism of my music.