I know a great number of musicians who have more then enough talent to do this thing for a living – and would dearly love to be doing just that – yet they’re languishing away in boring day jobs, working in cover bands playing music they don’t like to punters who don’t care. My mate Brett (with whom I’ve just recently started playing again) writes amazing, complex, clever music, but his bills get paid from singing Cold Chisel and Bryan Adams songs to inebriated North-Westerners. More exciting than collating TPS reports I suppose, but perhaps not so much once you get to the three hundredth rendition of Summer of 69 for the financial year.

So is it just a matter of tenacity? Being in the right place at the right time? That’s long been a bit of an albatross for us Taswegians. I’m not sure how long it’s been since we saw the last Tasmanian music star, but I suspect it’s been a good while. But then, I’m not talking “stardom” neccessarily – I’m talking about making a living, getting by, being comfortable, and not having to rent your soul to the corporate world or the government for 38 hours a week to achieve it.

I couldn’t even begin to speculate on a remedy. Just keep plugging away I guess – the problem is it’s a great big Catch-22. If you tie yourself to a “real job” (and you pretty much have to if you want to enjoy those little luxuries like a car, somewhere to live, or nutritionally adequate food) then the majority of your productive hours are lost in the name of, oh I don’t know, calculating some other fellow’s tax returns, or taking pictures of people shaking hands with suits on, or explaining to supposedly intelligent people over the phone where the on-button is. It’s unlikely that you’ll be in the right place at the right time for that big musical break when the majority of your time is spent at work. Unless of course the right place happens to be where you work, which (let’s face it) is unlikely.

Pay close attention to the dog on the endscreen

If I were of a mind to make a real world simile, I’d say it’s somewhat like turning on the hot tap and having to wait for the cold water to run through before the hot arrives. You can get frustrated and angry at the time it’s taking, but that’s not going to make the hot come through any faster. Of course if that were the best analogy I could come up with, I’d probably skip it altogether.

Anyway, it’s with this phenomenon in mind that I’ve been working on some side project music whilst waiting for the flashes of lightning required to complete the outstanding T3E material. And because I’m an incurable narcissist & Jem Godfrey fanboy, I took some video. So here it is:

Lots to report, but we’re taking the dogs to the beach, so it’ll have to wait. Tally ho!

Apparently I have an extra sort of half-disc, where the below-the disc part tried to grow another one while I was cooking.¹ Not at all related to the discomfort (which is just the regular old untreated strain from years ago which slowly compounds) but as the doctor said, “you’re more interesting than you thought”.

And I already thought I was fairly interesting…

In other news, we’ve been window-shopping at some slightly more rural-y houses the last few days. It’s always been the 3-5 year plan to move on to somewhere with at least an acre or so (look at me with my anachronistic measurements of area), but a few little cul-de-sac related goings on have got us considering bringing the plan forward a tad. Just tyre-kicking at this stage, but with an open mind toward stepping it up. My garage-studio conversion has never really hit its stride, and a couple of the places we’re considering have nice out-buildings, so that could be a plus

1. I’m using “cooking” here as a euphemism for growing in the womb. My spine didn’t just decide to whip up some extra parts while I was making tortillas or something…

One wet Cavoodle, Bruny Island, iPhone.

Hey hey… apparently I’m about to be released again. Venezuelan progsters Echoes were kind enough to invite me to contribute some melodies & a vocal performance to a song on their CD. Well it’s all done, it’s called Nature|Existence, and it’s about to come out come out on ProgRock Records.

You can hear it in glorious bit-decimated, dynamics-less myspace-o-vision, and then pre-order the CD from PRR, or buy the download in OGG or FLAC format from Mindawn and have it right now! NOW, I tell you! What black-magic technological madness is this?!

I’m getting a free copy apparently, which will be nice. But if I wasn’t, I’d totally buy one. I might even buy one anyway, I’m crazy and edgy like that.

Not quite this crazy, mind you...

I’m just having a listen again, and I must say I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I wasn’t so much at the time, it was a fairly twisty time signature and I felt like I was having trouble getting the lyrics to sit, but with the advantage of some perspective (I would estimate that I recorded this close to 2 years ago) I think it’s not too bad. Hurrah!

I’d like to dedicate the adlib at 3:59 to Andy Kuntz of Vanden Plas – a band so self confident that they named themselves after a 19th century coachbuilding company.

This totally says "prog rock" to me.