I feel like I’m thrashing around emotionally, after emerging from a long stretch of intense computer-focused work. In the last month, including my massage, teaching and metrix jobs, I’ve released three albums (Autochthon, Embodied, and Embodied Limited Edition), finished 95% of a DVD, all with cover art and sound mixing/video editing that I’ve done, and redesigned four websites (neevita.net, blog.neevita.net, fakehair.net, notapplicable.org). I don’t even want to know how many full days and nights I’ve spent sitting on the computer filling out forms, rendering shit, uploading shit, editing images..
I’m pretty worn out, and now I find myself wildly ambivalent about these projects. Earlier today as I listened to the “world” release of Embodied (which will only be available in the US on physical CD because I can’t justify another $400 to license the fucking covers for anything more than that) through a nice stereo, I felt proud and accomplished and hopeful, like I’d produced a damn fine album and at some point the right person is going to notice the damn thing and maybe something will come of this stupid expensive hobby that I periodically vomit my soul at.
A half day and a few hours of online researching later, I’m discouraged and want to give up, and I remember that all along, always, knowing my music is good is painful. The thought of managing the licensing for Embodied for the scale of release that might get me anywhere is depressing and daunting, and every time I imagine someone buying the album, I get a knot in my gut about the unfinished ends regarding it. I feel like I can’t truly seek the attention I want the music to have because I’m fucking broke.
Once I let Embodied aggregate, I have no way to control how many times a station plays which song, or how many people stream the songs from other websites. And even if I did manage to license 500 streams or whatever, I’m terrified that one of the songs will take off and I’ll get busted for not having the proper licensing in place already. Which is stupid because that’s not actually going to happen.
Conflictingly, part of me really must feel that if the right people just HEARD this shit my style would find a wide audience. I was thinking about open mic’s again and maybe going to one and what songs I should prepare. I was getting excited about the nervous silence there would be as I started playing, knwoing it would be intense but I could handle it, with my mind racing behind my squint trying to feel out what people were thinking but not being able to look at anyone, and then imagining the one person in the bar/coffeshop/whatever who would approach me after the show and talk with me and give me feedback, and how good that would feel and how alive that would make me and what a big step that would be for me to take and maybe if I did it a few times it wouldn’t feel so scary and I could gain some confidence playing for unknown audiences in environments I’m not in control of and play shows around here and have people actually hear what I’m doing and it would all snowball and I’d start having fun with it finally, finally finally and over a short time I could solve all my fucking musical problems.
But for open mic, the cover songs make more sense than the originals, and are what people would actually react to/identify with, and I can do many of them on portable instruments but I don’t have original music I want to share on those instruments and then I think about how much of a pain in the ass my synth rig would be to set up for a tiny open mic and how annoyed people would be at me for taking time to set up and then it turns into a nightmare where everyone in the place wants me off stage before I even start singing my whining weird pussygoth crap and the audience just sits there wondering who this high pitched whining bitch is and they sit there in silent protest until I pack my shit up and leave with nothing but a sense of how cold and unforgiving the room was, knowing I was too awkward and nervous and insecure to ingratiate myself to the audience and win them over, just like the second night of Embodied where I played nearly an entire show to silence and timid applause even though the audience was full of people who know and love and support me and I remember how uncomfortable and failed that felt and how I’ve questioned it ever since the show and how I should have learned from that and never fucking gone to that stupid bar in the first place and how I should just go throw myself in traffic or find a way to drop my synth on my stupid tiny worthless head.
And, once again, I think about going to an open mic for less than a minute before I’ve talked myself out of doing it for some reason.
It’s kind of amazing how convinced I am that if I perform someone elses song now some men in black will approach me in 15 years when anyone knows who the fuck I am, wagging their fingers and suing me. And even though I make the songs mine, it just doesn’t feel right in my heart and I know it’s not right to profit from a song someone wrote without them seeing something from it. I know how fucking pissed off I would be if I saw someone selling an album with my unlicensed song on it. I wish the world worked differently and I could just fucking paypal the artist $20 to let me use their damn song and call it good. That’s how it was happening on mp3.com when I was being approached by film makers and shit. That shit makes sense to me.
Getting on Pandora is apparently hard now, and requires a subscription service to Amazon just to apply. I signed up for the Amazon account today, as well as to SoundExchange (they collect royaltiest for recording copyright holders), who was apparently aware of one of my songs (Preterition) already. Then I started looking into BMI/ASCAP or SESAC (they collect royalties for publishers and songwriters) as which publishing rights company to go with and just felt overwhelmed.
Even just trying to figure out what fucking GENRE my music fits into in while filling out all these forms and shit makes me fucking face palm. I swear every form I’ve filled out for Embodied has a different genre, each company has their own list of possibilities and none of them are consistent and even if they were the only genre I’ve fully agreed with is “Live performance” and that doesn’t say anything about what the music SOUNDS like.
Since the release, I’ve sold three digital copies of Autochthon, and one physical CD. I’ve even sold a Limited Edition version of Embodied (and gave a lot of them away). I should be excited, I know. Instead, what I see is either the mountain of work I still have ahead — including finishing the fucking DVD for the Embodied LE I sold –, or the mountain of work I’ve already left behind. I feel like it’s an uphill battle that I’m fighting without any weapons, trying to relive my past, fighting to get something back that I stumbled upon 10 fucking years ago when the world was different, and then gave away shortly after.
I’ve been a wreck ever since I took on the Embodied album and decided to get formal about music. Clearly, I need help, or I need to fucking give this shit up. I feel like I need someone who understands the business and wants to invest in my music, deal with all these fucking forms and jargon and rights issues, look over what I’ve already done and see if I’m fucking things up, and get me heard, who I can also trust.
But I don’t fucking trust anyone, and I don’t know anyone in music who gives a shit about the kind of music I make, and after 10 years of being a self published hermit, I don’t know where to start even if I wanted to challenge that mistrust and take a leap to try to find someone who does, and I’m pretty fucking sure that I won’t find them in Seattle.
Is it only in my world that “progress” is so sad and frustrating and fucking hopeless feeling? Because I feel unbelievably alone in this.