What disturbs me, though, is not the race to the extremes (seriously… do you really believe that Obama’s one-word slogan “Forward” is subliminal Marxism? Are you that deluded?). No, what disturbs me is how we drive this extremism into our children on an institutional level.

All Things Lead To The Bomb

I recently had the “pleasure” of judging a high school debate tournament at Harvard. Believe me, I use the term “pleasure” in the same manner a reviewer refers to Jack White’s “singing”. I spent that day in something close to my own personal hell, listening to teenagers explain why everything from unmanned aerial drones to relaxing trade restrictions on China would lead to the extinction of all life on Earth.

No, seriously, that’s where every line of reasoning ended up. You see, in Junior High and High School Debate, the kids are taught that the severity of the consequences helps prove their point. Thus, every goddamned argument leads to nuclear annihilation. I know, I just lamented hyperbole three paragraphs ago, but I’m not making this up. I wish I were. They teach these kids to go straight for the “we’re all gonna die” card so that their arguments will carry more weight.

Six Degrees of Extinction

It’s not debate, it’s the Nuclear Holocaust Kevin Bacon Game. Every one of those kids played the same angle: go from initial argument to the destruction of all mankind in as few steps as reasonably possible. Why? Because that’s what they’re taught to do. Repealing “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” will indeed cause World War III.

Now ask yourself this: How many of your future congressmen, senators, presidents, political strategists, attorneys, and maybe even investigative journalists went through debate classes as a child? With the way this sprint-to-the-extreme mindset is institutionalized, is anyone surprised that all we ever see in public discourse are scare tactics and exaggeration?

The only difference between High School Debate at Harvard and what we see every election year are that the kids are forced to do exhaustive research before they open their mouths.

General Ebel’s Advice

Remember what all these political assclowns running for office or analyzing on network news have been trained to do since they were 13 years old- scare you into believing anything they say.

Traffic Jam Session

The first and most easily followed result was website traffic. Thanks to Google Analytics I was able to watch real-time numbers throughout the day. Sometimes I’d see a tweet or a G+ post and go check out the stats to watch the bump, but more frequently I’d see the traffic number suddenly spike and then go look for what caused it. Many, many thanks to FurAffinity for all the traffic they sent my way, you were easily the #1 driver for this event other than myself!

Overall, traffic to my website jumped (wait for it) 1,058% yesterday. Obviously the majority were fellow Amercians, but the UK and Canada nearly tied for second place with Germany and others close behind. I was a little surprised to see a nearly even split between Firefox and Chrome browsers cruising the site since, to my knowledge, people only use Chrome for Google+ Hangouts. Eight of you were still using IE 6 (seriously, wtf?)

But you don’t really care about traffic, you want to hear about charts.

Bombs Away Part I: iTunes

The most difficult chart to follow was the iTunes Music Store. Like all things Apple, they don’t announce how often they update their charts, how they calculate positions, where an album is likely to end up, or what it takes to get on the front page. We just sort of had to stumble across the results whenever we could. I don’t know if anyone else saw a higher peak than we did (please let me know!), but when we finally did see movement, The Lives of Dexter Peterson hit #85 on the iTunes Rock chart (by the time I took a screen-cap it was at 87). As of this morning, it’s sitting at #127, but damn… we broke the top 100!

To give some perspective, that #85 put me higher up than Elton John, the Foo Fighters, and The White Stripes. While I only take pleasure (no small amount) in besting the latter, that should clarify the kind of league I was playing in. This is why I was pushing so hard for support from the community- to quote Oliver Platt from The West Wing, “this isn’t Arena League, this is NFL football.” The fact that I’m even visible on the rock chart at all right now is a victory, but breaking the top 100 is a badge that the Robot Army should wear with pride.

Bombs Away Part II: Amazon

I’ll start with the good news: As of this morning, The Lives of Dexter Peterson is currently the #1 best seller in Amazon’s Adult Alternative category. Boom! That’s far more than I expected to happen with this little stunt. In fact, the album hit some incredible milestones yesterday, but what matters most are the lasting effects. Amazon’s charts are updated hourly, so any victories could be rolled back in less time than it takes to watch Serenity on Netflix.

The current standings for the album:

• #1 in Adult Alternative
• #6 in Miscellaneous (seriously, that’s a genre?)
• #44 in Alternative Rock (think Green Day or The Black Keys)
• #225 in all of Amazon MP3

Think about it for a second. I am nobody (just like my Manifesto says). I do not have a record label, management, a publicist, or major investors. All I have are people like you who are reading this long, boring wrap-up because you like my tunes. You’ve put my new album in the top ten of a couple genre charts, the top 50 of a particularly competitive genre chart, and the fact that I’m in triple-digit standing in all of Amazon’s music catalog at all is nothing short of jaw-dropping.

As for the single itself, “I Wish I Were”:

• #1 in Miscellaneous (there we go again…)
• #4 in Adult Alternative
• #38 in Alternative Rock
• #382 in all of Amazon MP3′s singles

One thing that the iTunes charts lack is a “Billboard Hot 100″ equivalent. Amazon, however, calls it their “Movers and Shakers” chart. Thanks to the efforts of a ton of people yesterday, the album is still #5 and the single is #2 on the Movers and Shakers chart. This one, by definition, is temporal, but if you want to measure a surge, this is the best place to look. Oh, if only I could conquer the music world at 18,827% growth for the rest of my career. Hell, for the rest of the week, even.

My Conclusion

I have no conclusion yet. After 24 hours, I’m humbled, stunned, and excited all at the same time, but God only knows what this surge will mean in the long run. I will certainly try this again the next time I release an album, but as one fan suggested on Twitter I will not do this for more than a day at a time. The amount of prep, coordination, and flat-out spamblasting involved just isn’t sustainable. People seemed excited enough about joining the effort for a day, but I’m pretty sure I’d lose a lot of friends if I did this all the time.

The one solid conclusion I can come to is really a confirmation of something I realized years ago: I have the best fans ever invented. Thank you.

(Oh, and if you’re still reading this, please do me a favor and leave a review on iTunes and Amazon if you liked what you heard. Thanks!)

iTunes Instructions

1. Head to www.matthewebel.com/itunes
2. Purchase the single “I Wish I Were” for 99¢ – Even if you intend to buy the full album, just buy the single first!
3. If you signed up to buy the whole album, go back to www.matthewebel.com/itunes after downloading the single and take advantage of iTunes “Complete My Album” feature. The rest of the album will be discounted so you’re not buying the same track twice. This way “I Wish I Were” will still hit the single charts even if you’re buying the whole album.
4. Let me know via Twitter!
5. Tell your friends to join the effort!
   
6. If you’d like to gift an album or track to a friend, go back to step 1 and click the triangle next to the Buy links… you’ll see “Gift This Album” or “Gift This Song” as an option!

Amazon MP3 Instructions

Single Track Only:

1. Head to www.matthewebel.com/amazon
2. Purchase “I Wish I Were” for 99¢
3. Let me know via Twitter!
4. Tell your friends to join the effort!
   
5. If you’d like to gift an album or track to a friend, go back to step 1 and click “Give song as a gift”

Full Album Only:

1. Head to http://amzn.to/DexterPetersonMP3
2. Purchase The Lives of Dexter Peterson for $8.99;
3. Let me know via Twitter!
4. Tell your friends to join the effort!
   
5. If you’d like to gift an album or track to a friend, go back to step 1 and click “Give album OR song as a gift!”

No, I had good reason to start the story off in the distant, foreign land of NYC, but first I needed to dispel a lot of my own misconceptions. I know I may sacrifice “street cred” by saying this (even more so than putting “street cred” in quotes), but I’m strictly a middle-class suburbanite kid. For the past few decades I’ve awakened to the sounds of birds and lawnmowers, not car stereos and construction crews. To put myself into Dexter’s shoes I had to learn something about the largest city in America.

Don’t Believe Everything You See

I’m probably not the only one who based his impression of New York City on movies and TV shows. If Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Die Hard with a Vengeance, and 100,000 episodes of Law and Order are my guiding documentaries, then New York City is actually a pretty easy place to understand…

• The subways are controlled by roving street gangs who spray paint everything within reach and threaten everyone with guns and knives.
• Homeless people constantly wander around yammering to themselves and harassing people for change.
• Every street is littered with… well, litter. And people sleeping in boxes, used needles, obvious hookers…
• The sewers are infested with ninjas and Ron Perlman.
• Making eye contact with anyone, anywhere, for any reason will get you shot, stabbed, or both.

Big Apple residents, stop me if any of this sounds familiar. Maybe all stereotypes are formed around a grain of truth, but my few experiences actually visiting New York have been nothing like this.

Yeah, it’s crowded. Duh. But the impersonality of a major metropolis doesn’t completely degrade everyone’s sense of humanity. A suburbanite like myself has to get used to things like coffee shops with no bathrooms and traffic that ignores lines and signs, sure. The noise level is much higher and it never stops, but it’s not like Mayor Bloomberg has mandated that at least one jackhammer per square block must be running at all times. It’s just… busy. The subways are dirtier than Boston’s, but at least they run all night.

Where No One Knows Your Name

The important thing I noticed about the people of New York, though, is that they don’t care about you… in the good way. So many people from so many different parts of this planet live in such a small area that nothing really seems out of place. You can see a flaming queer in rubber shorts, an Orthodox Jew, an African in a dashiki, and a Muslim couple complete with long beard and hijab all waiting for the same bus. And nobody’s trying to kill each other (mostly they’re all just noses-down staring at their iPhones anyway).

Dexter could bump into all his former and future lives right there in Manhattan and nothing would seem out of place- WWII uniform, Antarctic parka, 1970′s lab coat, powdered wig… He wouldn’t even need to be near Broadway for people to accept such variety and move on with their lives.

Dexter himself grew up in Suburbia, just like me, but the Big Apple seemed like the best natural camouflage for someone living as thousands of other people. If he ever wakes up at home and can’t quite shake the effects of his previous life, he could still venture outside with little chance of anyone calling the police. I doubt he’d be able to do the same in Devil’s Lake, North Dakota.

Writing About What You Know

There’s no way I could claim to know what it’s like living in NYC, even if I grilled Ariel Hyatt for info. Then again, there’s no way Gene Rodenberry knew what space travel was like or Anne Rice knew what living through multiple centuries with no sunlight would do to a person.

I do, however, know what it’s like to feel lost. I know what it’s like to miss my home and my routine. I know what it’s like to be afraid of commitment and what it’s like to be self-centered. I know what it’s like to open up to someone for the first time and share secrets you wouldn’t even admit to your cat.

I know what it’s like to fall in love when you least expect it.

Like all science fiction and most adventure stories, The Lives of Dexter Peterson isn’t an autobiography. While “living in New York City” is a perfectly attainable feat, in my case it’s merely a backdrop to what’s really happening: A young man is lost in his own search for identity and no one- not one of the millions of people he calls neighbors -can help him figure out who the hell he really is.

Those that know my inspirations and tastes might think that the album title’s some kind of homage to Ben Folds’ The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner. Sure, that album kicks many flavors of ass and I’d love to think that Dexter and Reinhold might be friends somewhere in the charts, but other than the lengthy title they really have nothing in common besides a lot of piano.

No, Dexter’s origins are a bit more meta than that.

Strategically Planned Chaos

Back in 2005 (you know, when Facebook was where you found your old college buddies) I took part in something called NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to start with a blank page on November 1st and write 50,000 words by December. That’s over 1,600 words per day, or about five and a half standard paperback pages. Every single day. This kind of pace guarantees two things:

1. Whatever you write is probably going to be crap.
2. Any story you’ve got in mind will either be rock-solid or totally disintegrate, either of which can lead to a good novel.

It’s the second point that led me to create Dexter. I figured that if I was going to survive an effort like this, I’d better be working with a story that could move with the kind of random attention span I’d likely be suffering. Hence, Dexter was born not out of something truly compelling that I needed to say, his Genesis was more a utility to prevent writer’s block from killing my daily word count. His ordeal of finding his entire world shifted like the Mad Hatter’s tea party made for a convenient way to push the word count higher without devoting any excess time to a dying plot line.

Since Dexter’s reality jumps from one life to the next at any given moment, I had the freedom to abandon a thread as soon as I started running out of ideas. It’s the dream of every twenty-something male who’s afraid of commitment.

From Chaos, Meaning

About halfway into my NaNoWriMo ordeal, I actually began to formulate a direction for Dexter. If anything, his story is a story about finding focus. Are you the kind of person who has never held a job for more than a few years? A serial dater? Have you changed addresses more than you’ve changed hairstyles? You can probably relate to Dexter, even if you’re not a time-traveler. Dexter’s story is the same as every post-college American kid currently wandering Europe with a giant backpack and a 2-terabyte iPhoto library.

And yet he finds something in his existential ADD that brings consistency: Alexandria. When I started the outline process in late October 2005, she wasn’t in there at all. For all I’d blocked out beforehand (yes, that’s allowed in the NaNo rules), I never planned on Dexter meeting a girl that would change him. I suppose none of us really plan on meeting someone like that, but if we’re lucky we do. I’d like to think I’m that lucky.

So for thirty days Dexter lived in my tortured sense of direction (poor guy), but as the month wore on I found it easier to coalesce a coherent world for him. Ideas recapitulated in surprising places. An endgame began to present itself with each new idea. Sure, Dexter’s story began as an etude or an exercise, but it became something strangely autobiographical.

From the chaos of my imagination, a nascent sense focus emerged. This was also the year I released Beer & Coffee.

Life By Life, Track By Track

In the coming weeks I’ll try to post some more detailed explanations about each of Dexter’s lives as they’re detailed in the novella. Each of the album’s tracks will be explained a bit better as well. Hopefully I can impart a better understanding of who Dexter Peterson is and, with any luck, I’ll come to a better understanding myself. Penning the story and creating the album aren’t the final steps in this creative process, they’re really just milestones.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. They not only help make Dexter more real to you, they make him more real for me as well.

Aaron Castro of Commerce City, Colo., was one of the leaders of a 41-person methamphetamine ring, which federal authorities said brought massive quantities of the drug into Colorado from Phoenix. He also apparently had a huge passion for comic books – he used his earnings to buy 18,753 of them.

-The L.A. Times

After all, who wants a giant BMW when you can dream about rocket ships and superheroines in wholly impractical attire?  They say he used the comics to launder money, but somehow I think deep down beneath the sinister drug kingpin exterior there was a burgeoning +1 nerd clawing his way out.

You have no idea how much I want a dozen of these things…

Yeah, that. I actually own the “Superman Is Dead” issue, naively thinking it might actually be worth something someday. In other news, I have a short stack of toilet paper with some pretty colors on it if anyone needs some…

PS – Elijah Wood is my hero.

Turning A Harpsichord Into A Guitar

I swear, I don’t base my blog posts on what C.C. Chapman writes in the morning, but today it seems we’re writing about the same subject:  How limitations spark creativity.  Kudos for beating me to it, Mr. C., you win this time…

The album I’ve been working on for the past year and a half presented all kinds of challenges:  How do I take a story called The Lives of Dexter Peterson and write music to accompany it?  Will I be able to bring a fictional character to life through more than one medium?  Can I still do all this stuff myself or do I need to start kissing some record label asses?

For all the external challenges I faced, I decided to impose one challenge of my own:  This album will use only six instruments. In the past I’ve drawn from all kinds of sonic palettes.  Hell, Goodbye Planet Earth used everything from strings to synthesizers, tubular bells to a distorted washing machine loop.  And, of course, robots.  For the new album, though, I wanted to see if I could create the sounds I wanted with the same 6 elements:

1. Vocals
2. Piano
3. Electric Piano
4. Harpsichord
5. Bass Synth
6. Percussion

Something I discovered, though, was that this self-imposed limitation did not hamper my creativity in any way.  In fact, it broadened my abilities as a composer and arranger.  Let’s say there’s a spot in a song that needs a low-mid-range BIG sound to make it full.  Normally I’d grab something like a Hammond B-3 organ and play a big thick chord in the background- works every time.  Big fat organ = one of Matthew Ebel’s usual tricks.  With a 6-piece palette, though, I had to think of new ways to fill that gap.

An Actor Playing A Role

Harpsichord (Photo by dalcrose)

Since The Lives of Dexter Peterson is an album about a fictional character, I had to become an actor during the writing process.  The songs, for the first time, weren’t strictly coming from my voice and my experiences.  The limitations of my own life didn’t dictate what I wrote about.  Though I’ve never been to outer space, I had to become a starship captain and imagine what I’d feel if I watched the woman I loved drifting away from me through an escape pod porthole.  I played a role, just like I’ve done on stage in plays, musicals, and opera.

In the same way, the six instruments had to do the same.  The limitations of a harpsichord, for example, are many:  It sounds tinny on top and boomy on bottom, it doesn’t sustain indefinitely like an organ or strings, its dynamic range is limited, and the plectrum makes an audible sound when your fingers come off the keys.  So what?

I just released a video for my Matthew Ebel dot net members showing how the harpsichord dressed itself up as an electric guitar and sang. The instrument could sound so much larger than its inventor ever intended, thanks to modern guitar amps and pedals.  By limiting my sonic palette for this album, I discovered the potential that some of these simple keyboard instruments possess.

Here’s an example of what the harpsichord sounded like on the album, followed by what it sounds like on its own:

Harpsichord Guitar Example (Download MP3)

Again, if you want to see the video of exactly how I transformed a harpsichord into a guitar, grab an All-Access or higher pass at Matthew Ebel dot net and watch while it’s still available.

In any case, who knows what discoveries and new abilities will arise from limitations?  I am a limited person, just like you, but I have no idea what I will become- either in spite of or because of those limitations.

Image via Wikipedia

You probably collected something at some point in your life, right?  Runtt collects vinyl records, I’ve got a stash of old badges from conventions I’ve been to, I know a lot of dads that collected enough National Geographic issues to build a magazine fort.  God knows if you’re reading my blog there’s a good chance you have a stack of comic books somewhere.  Whether they’re on your bookshelf or in your attic depends on how regularly you need to escape from reality.  Do we really think about monetary value when we hoard things like these?

Absolutely not.  What’s valuable to us are the sentiments we attach to things like comic books.  Just like the CD’s that people buy at my live shows, they’re tokens of emotional memory.  Sure, someone could buy my music on Amazon from their phone while they’re sitting in the audience, but the tangible properties of a CD will rouse an echo of the emotions they felt in that room that night.

In any case, at some point in your life we’ve all had to make a decision to either free up storage space or hang onto something for no good reason.  Thank God this guy kept that old stack of comics in his attic:

Rorrer, 31, of Oxnard, Calif., said he thought his great uncle Billy Wright’s comics were cool, but he didn’t realize how valuable they were for months after finding them neatly stacked in a basement closet while helping clear out his great aunt’s Martinsville, Va., home a few months after her death…He found out that his great uncle had managed as a boy to buy a staggering array of what became the most valuable comic books ever published, and kept them in good condition.

…The Action Comics No. 1 – which Wright bought when he was about 11 – is expected to sell for about $325,000. A Detective Comics No. 27, the 1939 issue that features the first appearance of Batman, is expected to get about $475,000. And the Captain America No. 2 with Hitler on the cover that had caught Rorrer’s eye? That’s expected to bring in about $100,000.

-KCRA.com

A single, thin stack of newspaper-grade wood pulp bound in flimsy card stock, strategically splattered with four pigments.  Two million dollars. Damn.  I guess that which carries emotional value for me might just carry the same for someone else…  someone who might’ve freed up storage space and regretted it later in life.  Nobody read a little booklet about a man in red underwear and thought “when I retire, I’ll sell this thing for six figures.”

All they thought was “when I read this, I can leap tall buildings in a single bound.”  That kind of feeling belongs on display.  That’s the value of a good comic book, a good story, a good song.  That is why our attics are stuffed to the rafters.  Don’t be afraid to go digging through your emotional echoes sometime, you might just find treasures worth keeping on display.