64x30: First Quarter--Wherein he Toiled in Obscurity

Rolling Stone hasn't written back. In fact, my subsequent emails updating them on the progress of this project have come back undeliverable. Are the editors of Rolling Stone so divorced from the production of independent music that if you send them a letter telling them about the album you just started making, they block your email address, or is the "Reply" button on G-mail busted? You decide.

The folks at Brooklyn Vegan came over and listened, and one commented over on their side that they wanted royalties, but as the comment was again anonymous, I'm going to have a hard time paying up.

The editor of Pitchfork hasn't written back. Did I tell you I wrote to the editor of Pitchfork? I did. But it's only been a couple days. I'm not giving up hope yet.

Also, this morning, I commented on Lucinda Williams' facebook wall to ask if she minds my quoting her songs in my song about her, "Lucinda." It's been like, eight hours, and so far there's no reply at all. There's no reply at all. Is anybody listening?

Oh, also, yesterday I posted "You're Really Hot," which brings 64x30 up to sixteen songs. That's six more than the Eagles' greatest hits and seven more than Michael Jackson's Thriller. But I'm not stopping. Before this is through, I'm going to record sixty-four more original songs. I even mostly wrote one this morning. Hopefully tonight I'll figure out how to play it and produce a high fidelity multiple track recording for your listening enjoyment.

But while we're on the subject of contacting people who aren't likely to be very interested in hearing back, does anybody have an email address for Stephen Merritt? Tell him I'm coming.

64x30: Brooklyn Vegan Comment War?

There's a good review of Arcade Fire's new album up on Brooklyn Vegan. However, some of the comments were less than charitable. It got me thinking about how hard it must be to make music for millions of people you haven't even met. I mean, I have a hard enough time writing a song that means something to both myself and the woman I wrote it about. So it must be really difficult to write songs for, say, everyone who lives in any suburb, everywhere, as Arcade Fire have to do now.

On my current superalbum, 64x30, I'm trying to write sixty-four songs in sixty-four days. I don't expect that anybody but me is going to love all of them. Actually, I myself hate certain aspects of each of them, even though on the whole I love them each as if they were my own children. If I were spending sixty-four days recording one perfect song, I wouldn't put out a song with a little piece I didn't like. But I feel like that's what I do in most bands I play with, and now I'd like to try the opposite. My goal now is that, by the end of the album, anyone who listens to the whole thing will be able to find one or two songs that they completely relate to. Maybe they won't understand half of the other ones at all, but they'll be able to point to one or two and say, "that's my song. That's what I feel like."

So this is a song that's not for the commenters at Brooklyn Vegan, although along with Walt Whitman I love them as though they were myself, this is a song that's for Arcade Fire to relate to, and say, "yeah. if you took all the negative stuff people in just one community can say about an album we just spent years working on, well, you could write a pretty good song."