Measurable Portion of Soul Dying Daily (free content within)

[richtrix]

Greetings,

 

In this post I am in search of somebody... anybody to just give a damn. So if you have any damns to give please, I beg you, read on. 

 

[this ended up being a longer post than I'd thought. If you're short on time please at least download the album at the bottom]

 

For over a decade I have been in a rock band. We are called "The Industry". The current lineup of members has been together for 10 years. I'm now 32 years old. It's probably the longest single endeavor of my life to this point. Longer than my relationship with my wife. Longer than any career etc. 

 

Everything in my life, by all standards, is going quite well. Awesome wife, absolutely adorable 8 month old son I get to spend all day with every day while at the same time watching my personal income increase fairly steadily. I find my businesses fairly gratifying even though they are far from what this young Bachelor of Physics ever imagined himself doing. But... there is this band. After college we dispersed for about 3 years and reformed when our bass player moved from Miami to live with me in Atlanta. Our drummer lives about 2 hours away and guitarist about 1 hour. Despite all odds we managed to plug through and keep practicing and playing shows. Our drummer had a child... still kept going. We found ourselves a bit in a rut and decided that it was time to seriously make the album we'd always wanted to to take us to the next level. On December 27th and 28th 2009 we tracked the drums at a nice studio in town and all through 2010 and 2011 we continued work on it. At times it would get back burnered, at times it would be worked on incessantly sometimes just steadily. In Fall 2011 we were at a low point. My best friend and bassist was despondent. Work on the album had begun to languish. It just seem so insurmountable a task at that point. Just at that time we got a big break and were able to open for the band Incubus. It was just us and them on the bill for a crowd of 8000. It was amazing. Here's a video of it http://youtu.be/2DL8vpCKEng

Rejuvenated we really dug into the album. Shortly after I started a new job which gave me flexible hours and a big increase (to me) in income. In January 2012 our producer had a good friend open a fantastic studio with a historic console freshly purchased from a legendary studio which had just closed its doors, Southern Tracks, at its heart. I also was friends with the owner and he gave us a deal that would make affordable the once absolutely out of reach. We took our completed tracks there and over the course of 8 months mixed the album on the SSL G Series until it was perfect. Then off to LA for mastering which went back and forth until February of this year. In an unexpected turn my son came into the world two months ahead of schedule. A scary and joyful time consisting of about 1.5 months in the hospital for 5 hours a day or more insued. Somewhere in those years our drummer had a second child and took a full time job that takes 60-80 hours a week. Our guitarist move an hour further away and over this past summer my bass player had a relationship go sour which triggered many unaddressed issues to bubble up and he plunged into a deep depression. At my prodding he now sees a therapist (two actually) and is on a slow but steady course of increased self knowledge. We spend a lot of time together he and I. FDR has really helped me, I feel, to give some reasonable advice to him or point him at a podcast or two. We hardly play music together any more. He is a musical prodigy. He is has a masters degree in percussion from UM and plays bass and guitar equally well. Perfect pitch, the whole nine yards. He doesn't even like music right now. Music is just what he's always been good at. He is now realizing through therapy etc. that he's always played music for attention. Rarely for his own gratification. He teaches high school marching band as an outside percussion assistant at a couple of good schools in the area. He hates it now. He gigs around town in cover bands etc. for extra cash. He feels dead inside when he does. It's hard for us to get the creativity going right now. When we get close it eventually hits a wall and we just go home to bed. Our band has always had its drama. Our drummer is AMAZING. Top notch, absolute pro. He's hilarious to as well. He's also completely insane and a royal pain in the ass. He is always bitching about money. Particularly gas money for his 2 hour drive. He is terrible with money. His wife still gives him envelopes of cash each week for his various expenses. He was blacklisted from attaining a credit card for 6 years at one point. I think he has one now though. For the past 3 years or so we've only been able to get him to come up for shows. Maybe one practice beforehand, only to make sure we didn't suck for the gig. Can't really blame him all things considered. However, this means no time for new material, just hashing over the same old tunes some of which we've been playing for 10 years or more. Oft since we don't play as often as most bands the rehearsals don't go well. Sometimes the shows don't too. This is demoralizing since we've been at this so long. On hand it's like riding a bike and we have it down, on the other hand the bike has gotten rusty and the tire is flat. We mostly practice without the drummer, sometimes we'll play along with tracks of his part put through our PA but it's always empty playing in a rock band without a drummer. Recently my bass player and I finally have realized that if are to carry on at all we need a new drummer and probably a new guitarist. We've known this for years but these guys are old friends. It's really hard. We can't bring ourselves to have the conversation with them. With our drummer it will ruin the friendship. We're pretty sure of this. Not much of a friendship then perhaps but I think we weight if the pain of doing the only course to drive the project forward is worth it. I mean what if we burned those bridges and then never even did anything. That's a little defeatist but these are thoughts we have. We've played with some others but it's not the same. We'll find someone though if we persevere. We just feel as if we are operating in a total vacuum of interest at this point. We are the only ones that care about this project and that is waning each day. Any fans we have have long since forgotten us due to our lack of staying engaged and making new content. The extravagant album that we worked on for 3+ years is absolutely fantastic from a production standpoint. I like the music but that's subjective of course. It's ready to release but we've held off. We're in total limbo. Bass player has a studio in his basement about 17 minutes away from me. He spent a year or more and thousands of dollars remodeling it after a flood. We've not recorded a damn thing in there in over a year. We've decided to just start setting the recording gear back up and a couple nights a week and he and I will start recording the new ideas we've been having and see what happens. It's literally a baby step to find again what we both feel we've lost somewhere along the way. I'm tearing up writing this part as the hole left by this project is just growing by the day. There is so much guilt, so many missed opportunities and so much sunk costs. Hundreds of man hours on the album maybe even thousands. Probably about $20,000 spent spread out over the course of it. Not to mention a happy helping of our souls embedded in these 16bit 44100Hz files hidden in a folder on my computer. We have so much going for us. We've had opportunities that any band would DIE for. We have accomplished in our album what maybe 3% of musicians ever will do. Yet we founder. It is almost as if I have a mental block that prevents me from being able to release the album. Prevents me from spending the 5 or 6 hours it will take to get it on iTunes. I literally just can't. So anyone here on FDR who wants it can have the album via download. You can share it if you like I really don't care if I make any money at this point with it. I don't know what I expect as responses here. I just want someone to hear it and maybe even like it. I had to let someone know how just terrible I feel about all of this. We did a kickstarter for this album in 2011 and still haven't fully delivered the promised items (only digital copies of the album not physical) every day the weight becomes more and more and it makes it daily harder to move forward in any way. It's hard to explain and I feel a little like I'm whining here but at least I know that, well hope that, this community won't see it that way. Anyhow... here's the link to our album: http://theindustry.us/TheIndustry-Distances1.zip

 

Thanks for reading and hopefully listening.

 

Sincerely,

Rich

 

[Gaurav251]

These are the important things I find in your sentences:

 

 "Our drummer is AMAZING. Top notch, absolute pro. He's hilarious to as well. He's also completely insane and a royal pain in the ass."

 

"Recently my bass player and I finally have realized that if are to carry on at all we need a new drummer and probably a new guitarist. We've known this for years but these guys are old friends. It's really hard. We can't bring ourselves to have the conversation with them. With our drummer it will ruin the friendship."

 

" It is almost as if I have a mental block that prevents me from being able to release the album. "
 

Since I didn't have time today to read all of your post today, I will make assumptions of what I hear, it seems like you don't really have that much of a connection with your band because if you did you shouldn't have problems discussing important things with your drummer and I wonder if this mental block that 'stunts' or 'paralyzes' you has something to do with the trust between your band members, again only assumptions since I haven't read the whole thing and I am very tired today, I will read the rest tomorrow.

[LovePrevails]

I'm not surprised by the mental block you have towards posting this up.. So much time and money and love and work posted into it.

 

it's like an immense pressure. What if no one cares? what if it tanks? what if you get negative feedback?

what if it does really well and no band is in place to pursue it?

 

there are a whole load of possible insecurities that may be holding you back.

 

My advice? DO IT

 

DO IT ANYWAY

 

whatever happens you can deal with it.

 

If you do get a positive response you can get who is still willing to play and canvas for new members who love it to fill the gaps.

 

The work is there - now get it out where people can enjoy it!

 

GO GO GO!