I’m not sure what year it was, but everybody was young. The crowd was… well, let’s say the crowd was just one person. Me. I was front and center with a bag of popcorn, close enough to the footlights to feel the heat. The concert that changed my life was about to begin and all I knew was that I wanted to hear some music. House lights down, the curtain parted, somewhere in the building an idiot complained about the wrong-sized bread.

The opening acts were a classic rock revue- not the shit that classic rock stations play now. Van Halen is not classic rock; Eddie learned his moves from these guys. Steppenwolf, The Who, and The Guess Who played back-to-back short sets, reminding all that you can still rock without auto-tune or makeup. I was in high school, but these guys wrote these songs decades earlier. Once the drums had exploded, the roadies dragged them offstage and brought out the evening’s first headlining act.

Like a curveball nailing a batter smack in the ear, the concert shifted to Contemporary Christian music. I shit you not, Jars of Clay started off with that one song that got played everywhere. At this point I was in college and the popcorn was already half empty. Dan said thank you and made his exit, just as the man himself walked on with a guitar. He was three feet tall and smiling like some kind of weird celtic punk-folk pixie. The rest of the band took their places and Caedmon’s Call started their set.

They didn’t just play a few songs, they performed a strange drama right in front of me. The beginning of the set did something Christian music’s not supposed to do: it made me think. And it made me dance (I must have looked weird, all alone in that front row). The band realized their mistake, I guess, and started playing the typical praise-and-worship crap. Only the diminutive one seemed as disappointed as I by the change in mood. By the end of their set, the house was silent and unmoving. The band quietly disassembled their gear and walked off stage right, but Derek Webb exited alone, stage left. He’d be back later.

For a long time there was nothing. It was as though the stage manager realized they’d booked the wrong lineup and was scrambling to put together another show right then and there. When finally the stage lights went up again there was a tall skinny guy like me standing at the mic. Train played three whole albums worth of material while I watched. I didn’t mind, I was out of college and hated my job; I had nothing better to do. With Pat’s voice still ringing out in the theater, they performed a no-huddle play and switched to Jason Mraz. I got out a notepad so I could keep on top of the linguistic swordplay.
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I give Nickelback a lot of crap, I know. I also know that 3.7 gazillion people love that band. I hold up acts like Nickelback and Miley Cyrus as shining examples of boring, tepid major label waste product (which they are). Is it because they’re not edgy enough for me? No, there are plenty of bands that are edgy to the point where I can’t listen to them. The entire punk genre, for example, or some of Ben Folds‘ earlier work. Just because something is too misshapen to fit in the focus-group approval box doesn’t mean it’s good either.

I propose that music is like any other recipe; there are main ingredients and there are accents. A plain lump of chicken breast (Nickelback) is not, by itself, a meal. If all you ate were plain chicken breasts your taste buds would most likely atrophy and fall off your tongue. On the other hand, a diet consisting entirely of black peppercorns (punk) would burn your mouth and leave you starving to death.

This, I believe, is an oversight on the part of most major labels and some indie artists. So that mellow, 90-bpm rock song sold 20 million round discs. It’s a good cut of meat, sure, but it’s only one part of the meal. You don’t want the entire album (or the band’s entire catalog) to sound like that one market-ready radio-friendly überhit ’cause the fans will get bored.

Here’s a secret: The artists will too. Most artists (songwriters at least) have a diverse range of output. This is what drives guys like Garth Brooks to become Chris Gaines or George Carlin to be Mr. Conductor. An artist’s output should reflect their humanity as a whole, not just the radio-friendly side or the dirty underground side. An album, especially, should sound like a well-balanced meal tastes.

If you don’t believe me, open up a restaurant that serves only unflavored pasta and chicken. Let me know how that goes for you.

If you remember me asking you via email to bug the folks over at Pandora, I’d like to thank you for your efforts. Even though one representative said they couldn’t find the CD’s I sent them months ago, it seems they must’ve found one. Goodbye Planet Earth is now available on the most cutting edge internet radio station, ready to stream!

(By the way, if you don’t remember me asking you about this, you’re not signed up for my email list yet.)

Why is this a slice of awesome pie? Two reasons: First, Pandora pays its BMI licensing fees like any other radio station, so the more my music plays on their system the more likely I’ll actually see a royalty payment (and, therefore, eat). Since the stations are built around a recommendation engine, my tunes will be played any time someone searches for someone famous like Ben Folds or Keane. They don’t even have to specifically search for my obscure name.

Second, since a lot of people will hear my music because I’m similar to the artists they’re searching for, there’s a good chance some of them might become fans of mine. I know more than a few people who have discovered new artists they like because of Pandora. As much as the RIAA likes to ignore it, people do in fact buy albums via iTunes and Amazon from Pandora recommendations.

So thank you, all of you, who helped raise the awareness! Hopefully some more of my albums will appear in their system soon, but for now you’ve really helped me break into a new playing field!

Every music site I sign up for has the same Influences field. To say that an artist influenced me is rather trivial… I may not like 50 Cent, but his work has influenced me (in the “dear God don’t ever let me sound like that” kind of way).

There are a certain number of acts, however, that throughout my development have made me want to play better, write better, entertain better, and be better. They are the ones that made me ask, “why can’t I do that?” And then I asked, “what can I do to be like that?” It’s the line between influence and inspiration, and there’s 7 on my list that cross that line.
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I get to go see [tag]Ben Folds[/tag] tonight at an in-studio performance. I think it’s at the Sony Tree studio where I helped cut a demo for a friend a couple years back, so I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a very intimate venue.

Ben’s one of those piano-rock icons that everybody’s heard, but not many people really recognize. And he’s arguably the best producer this town has ever seen. I can’t wait to finally see him in person, especially at a show without a huge noisy crowd or a giant ampitheatre PA system.