Tag Archives: Taylor Swift

Nashville, Don’t Let Me Down

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It’s about 8 hours from Lynchburg in Central Virginia to Nashville, Tennessee. You could do it faster if you pushed it, but I left early and wasn’t playing in Murfreesboro until Tuesday night.

When I was a writer and trying to push my prose up the mountain of recognition, Seth Godin was a “guru” of sorts. I know I’ll sometimes criticize the ubiquity of gurus, but there are some out there, like Godin, who are worth listening to and offer countless tips that move your craft forward: writing, music, maybe even mixed martial arts.

I’ve been following Matt Bacon on the ‘gram for a month or so. His stuff is so damn good (and practical) that I marvel that I’ve already started doing many of the things he talks about in terms of building a following. One of them recently was to find an area that you can tour regionally two or three times a year.

In many ways, this two-week tour is exactly that. Me, taking my all-original music, and playing cities and venues I’ve never played before. Including Nashville.

The DIY show I was part of on Tuesday night at The Shack was epic. Four different artists/bands, doing what they do, and showing support for me, the touring bard and minstrel passing through town. Chad James (aka, Karate Chad) seems to me to be a DIY force of nature in Murfreesboro. He’s originally told me he rarely does mid-week shows, especially Tuesday nights, but he made it happen. The link should be available soon on Twitch and when it is, I’ll post it, here. I’m also going to have some live footage of me playing what was about a 40 to 45 minutes set of originals.

[Shua, Murfreesboro singer-songwriter, covering Warren Zevon’s “Roland the Thompson Gunner”]

While Murfreesboro was sweet, my plan to play Wednesday night in Nashville fell through. The booking agent I’ve been working with texted me and told me that the venue has “discontinued all live music.” Wow! That fucking sucks! But, rather than let it derail me, I had a blast in Murfreesboro and I’m going to bring the same energy to Huntsville on Friday. Continue reading →

The Music Shift (I Don’t Sing Like Taylor Swift)

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The song “Music Shift” is about music approached as an avocation, if not a vocation. The idea of working a “shift” in terms of labor dates back to 1809 and mining. Playing guitar may not be mining but it helps to approach music with that same sense of purpose and consistency.

I begin the song by saying that playing music is a “grift.” This emanates from much of today’s music promotion being about “pay to play.” Yet, this is nothing new. We know about the days of payola. In our time, it’s the constant enticements to pay for this or that in terms of getting your music streamed. Even if your song(s) get played, you’ll make little to nothing because any profits from Spotify or other platforms aren’t funneled equitably to the creators of the work. The con works because musicians want their music heard by others.

Since I began writing songs and getting my music out there, I’ve had a sense that people really don’t understood what I do. I play indie/alternative rock with influences from lo-fi bands like Guided by Voices. For fans of Taylor Swift and her overly-produced schlock and corporate façade, lo-fi with a DIY orientation sounds foreign.

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Grammy Who?

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While I’ve never been a “dedicated follower of fashion,” as The Kinks sang, especially when it involved Top 40, mainstream pop, I somehow managed to cling to some sense of who the kinds of people were that garnered Grammys. Until this year.

The unbearable whiteness that is Taylor Swift. (Photo: Robert Hanashiro/USA Today)

The unbearable whiteness that’s Taylor Swift. (Photo: Robert Hanashiro/USA Today)

I guess that officially pushes me up and over the threshold of relevance, right? Actually, I do know who Taylor Swift is, so maybe I get a reprieve from getting shoved into the trash bin. Possibly that admission probably means that I need to check my white privilege.

My penchant has been for music that went against the grain, or wasn’t trying too hard to be fashionable. In high school it was The Dead Kennedys. I coped with my post-fundamentalist years stranded in Indiana, surrounded with a soundtrack that was weighted towards punk and industrial music; Black Flag and Ministry come to mind.  Hit singles never really captured my fancy. Continue reading →