Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Toward the point...

Okay, so this blog is gonna be really boring if I do it in chronological order. I want to make sure that my two readers so far have something to look forward to besides cleaning out my mental closet.

I had an idea for a business that would be really cool if someone started.

I'm in a band that gets virtually no love from the mainstream media, the major record labels, the world at large...Yet, we've been together for 8 years now. I've been in the band for 6. When I first joined the band we were buying a van from a liquor store parking lot so that we could get around the country more comfortably and reliably. That van turned 300,ooo miles last weekend. We played Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. In February. "This is ridiculous" we thought to ourselves. Yet, we sold out the little place we played in ME, and the huge place we played in VT. Turns out cabin fever is a good thing for your band. But we do this all the time.

You take your average artist that's on a major label, that's on the radio or MTV, and we draw more people to any given show in any given town than probably 90% of them. That there's something going on here is plain for anyone to see. That we're impossible to "market" in the traditional sense, in the traditional way is equally plain, to me at least. I don't even know how to answer the question "What kind of music do you guys play?" and I've been looking for a straight reply for 6 years. So I don't get frustrated when we put out a new record and it doesn't sell, or get the media response that I'm sure it'll get, or when the good radio play we're actually getting for the first time doesn't actualy translate into any hard numbers. Okay, so I do, but does it really matter? If you're a fan of RRE, how did you find RRE? Was it seeing an article in the paper, or a magazine? Was it by hearing us on XM/Sirius?

It may have been, but I'd say chances are pretty strong that either one of your friends turned you on to us, or that you stumbled across us on the internet. That tells me something.

2 comments:

  1. I like to blame David Gans for turning me on to Railroad Earth before I actually got to see them. I blame the Archive for letting me hear CDs of the band before I got to see them. I blame eD [and Jim & Janine] for telling me to 'get an Evite' - I WAS BLOWN AWAY the first time that I saw them in that back yard in Ringoes. I've traveled across the country twice so far to see them and look forward to many more years of BLISS!

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  2. As far as I'm concerned, you'll have to blame Scott Baron.

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