indiecology

How to Change Guitar Strings on a Friday Night

Step one. Shake your head in consternation at your broken e string because you were tuning DOWN, not up, and it has no right to behave this way in such a circumstance.

Step two. Pour a glass of wine to fortify yourself for this important task.

Step three. Drink a toast to the brave high E string that lost its life in the glory of battle. Your body is broken but your memory lives on, O Fabled E String!

Step four remove the broken E string from the guitar.

Step five, drink a toast to the gallant service of strings B, G, D, A and low E! May your retirement be long and happy!

Step six, put on a new E string.

Step seven, drink a toast to the long and happy career of your new high E string.

Step eight: Repeat steps six and seven for the remaining five strings. Note: Don’t hesitate to pour more wine if needed. Taking care of your instrument is an important task and it’s worth doing properly.

Step nine, tune your guitar up.

Step ten, wiggle all your strings around profusely to get the play out. You guys, this is the one important step I am bringing to the table here. I learned it when I did setups in a music store. You don’t need to just play and tune and play and tune and play and tune and be sad for the first few days of your new strings. EMPLOY THE WIGGLE METHOD. But do not break any strings because that will send you back to step one.

Step eleven, tune your guitar up again.

Step twelve, drink a toast to your fine handiwork. You deserve it.

Step thirteen, play a fine drinking song on your new strings… 

Lifechanging

I have this old metal poster advertising the Beatles at Shea propped up on one of my guitars across from my bed. It’s one of the first things I see every morning but not something I notice very often. I got it years ago from a thrift store.

This morning I looked at it and thought about how life-changing an event it was for so many people—my dad included. My dad, like me, has pursued music since his teenage years and never looked back, or doubted its viability as a career. Like me, he had supportive parents who didn’t try to make him get a “real” job. 

I’m seeing Ben Folds Five, a favorite of mine for years years, tonight on their first tour in maybe a decade. A new favorite of mine, Kate Miller-Heidke, is opening for them. 

Seeing the artists that have changed my life with their work, performing it in person—embodying that change for me and so many others—is something so moving for me it’s hard to describe. A few weeks ago I saw an Alanis Morisette concert for the first time with my boyfriend. I can’t capture the experience with words. It just felt so right for me to be there. It felt like I was connecting with myself and with music in this big beautiful way.

For me there’s an added connection because music is my life path. For the last few years I haven’t given myself much time to “be a fan” and experience stuff like this. I’ve been so busy trying to build my career so that I can give my life to music… that I don’t have time to give my life to music right now. Allowing myself to have these experiences this summer, reminding myself what drew me to music in the first place, has been really healing and renewing for me.

What I thought when I saw the Shea picture this morning was that that was why I really want to do music. I want to change people’s lives in big and small ways. I want to be the song that gets someone through a breakup, that makes someone realize they have to make a change, that someone giddily lip-synchs along to as they push themselves through a 5k. I want to make people feel something. I want to help them create their own lives, as music has helped me create mine.

Being a small-time indie artist is a challenge in a lot of ways and doesn’t have all or even most of the rewards we associate with rock stardom. Money is not a sure thing. Having a clean place to sleep on the road is not a sure thing. “Making it” is far from certain. All we are certain of is that we have to continue.

The reward that it does have is that the experience of music does not know the division of famous/not famous. My music has not reached the same number of ears and hearts as that of Alanis and Ben Folds Five and Kate Miller-Heidke, but it has made a difference to the ears and hearts that have already heard it. I’ve had people tell me that my music was healing. I’ve had a lot of people, women especially, say that my song “Convenient” really captured how they felt about someone and that it was freeing to hear. I’ve had my song Sincere covered by an awesome young woman I met at a school songwriting workshop.

These are not the sort of accomplishments you can put on a press kit to make you sound more accomplished and awesome. But they are the ones that mean the most to me. They are the ones that keep me going.

Being a Fan

Someone anonymous asked me why I haven’t been writing in my blog.

Anonymous, I am torn between answering “BECAUSE I’M A GREAT BIG FAIL” and “OMG someone notices and cares if I write in this blog!” Point being, thanks for caring and for reminding me to get back to it.

Here’s what I want to write about tonight: I went to see Kate Miller-Heidke play at Rockwood Music Hall tonight. Here are some reasons that made me friggin’ ecstatic:

1. I have been crazy about her music and dying to see her live since I found out about her existence a year or two ago.
2. I’ve PLAYED in Rockwood Music Hall. I went to go see a musician I am crazy about in a place I have actually physically played. That’s freakin’ cool.
3. I’ve always wanted to hang around after the show and meet my favorite musicians — just to say hello and gibber some idiotic thing about how much they inspire me or whatever. Tonight was the first night in all my 27 years I haven’t chickened out on that.

I realized recently that I have been trying so hard to put all my energy into getting myself noticed as a musician (for whatever it’s been worth) that I had stopped giving any time or energy to music itself.  For the longest time I didn’t pick up my guitar outside of a gig or band practice, or some late night to write a song. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I felt like there were other things I needed to do more — promotional stuff, business stuff, that sort of thing. The “I’ll be a musician when I’ve established myself as a musician” mentality.

Terrible! And honestly, I think it hurt my promotional efforts too on top of that. It’s hard to really get people interested in something you don’t feel passionate about and I was deliberately overruling my passion to do More Important Stuff.

So I resolved to get passionate about music again. I’ve been playing a lot more, for its own sake, and practicing and learning new techniques also for its own sake. Interestingly I haven’t found a big lack of time for the Other Important Stuff. I’m always busy, but somehow it seems easier to squeeze everything in when I am giving myself what I need most of all — time making music.

I make a lot of metaphors about music as a lover. I don’t mean it lightly. I crave it and need time with it the same way I crave and need time with someone I really care about. When I am not playing it is like there is a hole in my heart, and everything else gets a little harder. I know this and yet sometimes I get stupid and put my guitar aside for More Important Things. Dumb.

Anyway, part two of getting passionate about music again is being a fan. In the past week I have seen two really amazing shows — Kate Miller-Heidke tonight and Sister Sparrow and the Dirty Birds last Friday. Seeing live music is something else that I don’t always make the time or set aside the money for and I feel so refreshed and refilled by both experiences. 

Both of these shows kicked my ass into next Tuesday. Or to put it a less colorful way, inspired me to make more music and improve and practice more. I’ve always wanted to have a sort of monk-like relationship with music, spending hours a day honing my craft and communing with it the way a monk communes with religion. I’ve always felt I needed to find Success in some measure before I would have the time to do it. Now I’m starting to just give myself over to it anyway, right here and right now. I think it may be the best move possible for me AND my career. 

Anonymous asked: How did you start booking gigs?

Hi anonymous!

I started booking gigs as a teenager and I applied the same method I applied to finding a summer job: I walked into likely-seeming places and asked if they ever had live music. If the answer was yes, I would ask if I could come in and audition and/or bring in a demo. 

And actually, that’s still the best way to find a new gig, in my opinion. Find the place you want to play, ask, and have a good live performance and a good demo ready to pass over immediately. (Actually, a press kit is even better. Want to impress a small venue in another state that has never heard of you? Send them a shiny, well-presented press kit and act like you know what you’re doing. It works, my friend.)

Another upside to the “do it like you’re finding a summer job” mentality is that rejection isn’t that big a deal from that perspective. You remember how it was looking for a summer job in high school. All the good ones were taken by college kids before you were even out on break yet. Everyone took applications from you and nobody called you. But one week and forty applications later, if one or two people did call,  you felt awesome about that.  It’s the same with getting a gig — or with anything. Put the time in, expect that it’s a numbers game and feel awesome to get ANY results. Then go take the gig(s?) you get and make it (them?!) amazing. 

Repeat this process often enough, and at some point you don’t have to work so hard to find local gigs anymore. Some of them will come to you, because your name is in circulation and because you’ve made it known that you take a gig seriously and give the best show you can. That’s great! You have just level-upped. You can now start zero-ing in on venues that seem prestigious to you, or expand to a nearby locality — whatever you see as the next step you want to take. In the meantime, keep the relationships you have current, and act (and feel) thankful for EVERY opportunity to perform. 

Oh, yeah, and send thank you notes. Handwritten and mailed is better than email—people are tickled when someone does that in this day and age. I have had so many good things happen to me because I send thank you notes.

I don’t know exactly why I turned this into a little “rorie kelly’s guide to getting a gig” advice column and I certainly don’t mean to presume that you need the help, Anonymous. For all I know, you posted this question and then went to go play Madison Square Garden. In which case, hats off to you… mind telling me who does the booking there? :)

Anyway, though, if any awesome young musicians were hoping for some gig-getting advice, there’s some. Any of my fellow musicians have anything to add to this?

Hello world!

All right, Tumblr, you and me.

I have been wanting to make a blog about my exploits as an indie musician for a little while now. It is not meant to be super personal but will be somewhat personal—a collection of my thoughts and experiences as I navigate the world of music, self-promotion, and attempted career building. It is NOT meant to be promotional but more reflective. However, if you like my reflections so damn much that you feel you simply must support my music I certainly won’t stop you. (Instead, I will suggest that you like my facebook page or buy my songs on iTunes, as these actions make any indie artist very happy indeed.)

I hope with this blog I will share stories and pictures and music, ask for occasional advice and opinions, and hopefully gain a little bit of community. The community thing is why I chose Tumblr. I’m a web designer and could have happily embedded a lovely little blog in my website and CSSed it to death but I decided I was more into the idea of community. Tumblr seems to be very share-y and that appealed to me.  

I suppose I will also post pictures of cats saying hilarious things. This is a weakness of mine and seems to be a very accepted use of Tumblr. So I hope you will enjoy my cat pictures and tolerate my other stuff.

So that’s my story, Tumblr. Hi.