Tarradiddle (Sean Michael Imler and Bill Mason) are playing a house concert with Gazingas at 7pm, Friday April 2nd in Sunnyvale, CA. Contact me if you’d like to attend and I’ll add you to the eVite. If you haven’t heard us, we play folk rock covers and similar originals, both on acoustic guitar with lush harmonies. There are a couple of tracks on mySpace.
I’ve posted a small subset of the 1,000+ photos I took in New Zealand on Flickr. Mel and I traveled for 18 days in a campervan over both the South and North Islands, sleeping in motorparks and driving incessantly. We covered a lot of ground: South – Queenstown, Fiordlands, West Coast, East Coast, Marlborough, Abel Tasman, North – Wellington, Taupo, Rotorua, King Country, West Coast, Auckland.
The Pohutu geyser at Te Puia continuously spews water into the air. This picture is only a short burst. I have some others where it’s at least 20 feet if not more. I just love all the sulfur and iron in the rock.
Pohutu Geyser, Rotorua, New Zealand
I’m not sure this is really a weta. I actually think it’s more of a beetle but I can’t find anything like it in my search for New Zealand insects. The only bonafide weta I saw was dead unfortunately. They’re just the ugliest or prettiest things, depending on your pov. Kinda like a potato bug with wings. This little guy is just so photogenic tho, don’tcha think?
Thirsty Weta
Kawhia was one of the most beautiful places we visited. I was hard not to take a stunning picture and the day was perfect for it as it had been pouring down rain. The black sand beaches and one of the oldest Maori settlements, it held a lot of charm and the people were very friendly.
After seeing the t-shirt with the man plowing the sheep from behind with the caption reading, “Men at Work”, I just wasn’t sure what to make of this advert in a shop window in Wellington for a watch maybe? I don’t even recall.
Man Sheep Advert
Just fantastic seeing this pool of boiling acidic liquid coming from the mother earth. She’s quite the artist. This is White Island, the most active volcano in New Zealand in the Bay of Plenty on the east coast of the North Island. Took a helicopter and a lot of money to get there but you couldn’t take a bad picture. It was amazing.
Acrid White Island Pool
I didn’t book enough time in Wellington. It was a pretty cool city but I was determined to spend more time in the country and less in cities. This motif is based on the ferns that grow all over New Zealand and influenced the majority if Maori design.
Wellington, New Zealand
The one that got away. The ship that was anchored broke away leaving the anchor stranded on the island. The ship got wracked up against the rocks and died there. So sad… But, the anchor sure is cool.
We went to Hokitika on the West Coast of the South Island for the Wildfoods Festival. This was year 21 and people come from all over, dressed in costumes like Halloween. There are booths offering an assortment of edible substances ranging from homemade licorice to grubs pulled from the bark of dying trees. I ate mountain oysters… ack! and Mel ate sand flies because he thought he was getting them back for eating him. We also tried worm truffles from this wonderful menu.
Wildfoods Festival in Hokitika, New Zealand
This was Abel Tasman National Park which we did a hike or “tramp” thru. The lagoon below was probably the furthest north of any privately held land. Chunks of land were granted decades ago for logging and farming and they were going to rampage this beautiful land like most of New Zealand, but for some reason that’s beyond my knowledge, they turned the area into a gorgeous national park but offered the land to the original claimants for habitation only. I’da taken it!
Abel Tasman National Park, New Zealand
This was awesome. We did a trek from Tyrrant Bay to Anchorage Bay over an estuary during low tide which was incredible unto itself. But, when we got to Anchorage Bay, instead of heading to where our water taxi was to meet us, we went up the beach into this awesome alcove where we ran into a blue penguin in the wild. It was so cool to get up close to one of these adorable creatures and photograph him/her.
I’ve taken about 300 pictures at this point and my Canon S500 is dying. I have almost 2 more weeks here and I may have to buy a new camera to make it. We cruised Doubtful Sound, drove to Milford Sound, horse back rode into the mountains that has left my incredibly sore, seen some amazing lakes and taken pictures of them. I’ll be uploading to Flickr soon. In the meantime…
Wiki Jack connected with us in the the Auckland airport and has been hangin’ with us since. This is in Doubtful Sound in the Fiordlands of the southern South Island.
Wiki Jack in Doubtful Sound
I’m not sure these cows have ever seen humans before and they were so curious about what we exactly were that they came walking across the field and stopped to stare at us.
I played a character in a short film called “Trail of Gold.” I also wrote an original song for the film and performed it in the film. The producer, Vincent Lowe posted a video on Youtube of the one take performance mixed as a vignette of scenes from the film. Unfortunately, the film’s editing wasn’t completed so you can’t see it in it’s entirety at this point and I haven’t cut this in the studio, but I was lucky to get this piece to share with you. I hope you enjoy it.
I was walking down the dairy aisle in the super market. From the top shelf, I grabbed a jar or Best Foods mayonnaise. I was a little perplexed when this large jar of the creamy white delight felt so light, so I opened it. This brand new never opened jar was less than 1/8 full. Now, I’ve always detested when the container for a product is excessively large for the amount of product inside but this pushed it all to a whole new level. I felt completely vindicated in making my sandwich right there on the spot, recapping the mayonnaise and putting it back on the shelf and leaving.
I was at an open mic in a small brightly lit cafe. It was a fairly clean cafe with polished wooden chairs and tables in a rich walnutty finish and matching wainscoting. It was a morning event that started at 8am and was ending at noon. I had been asked by the proprietor to do a 1/2 hour set at noon when the open mic finished but it was somewhat unexpected. I was standing in the doorway trying to work out logistics in my head and little concerned because I didn’t even have a guitar with me. On top of that, I wasn’t sure what songs to play because I was familiar with this group of people and what flavour of music most appealed to them. I guess it was an anxiety dream.
Wow, I can’t believe this is the ninth week! I have to tell you that I’ve played virtually no music over the last 9 weeks I’ve been so busy with all the changes I’m making. I think the foundation is laid from here on out and I’ll be able to focus a little more on the craft but there is a list of 22 things that I have to complete as of yet. For instance, I’m in the process of making ringtones which unfortunately, ReverbNation is doing a store overhaul so I can’t post them right now which is a bummer because I’m very excited about these. I did a test run of “Island of Misfit Toys” and sent it to my phone and I’ve shared it with a couple friends by having them call me, and watching their faces light up when it’s playing on my phone has been a very cool experience. I may look for another way to host them so keep a lookout for a service that will allow me to sell them either directly from my site or host them but give me an API that links back to their service. Oh, and by the way, that’s the topic of this week’s chapter in the book, what Ariel calls the “Continuum Program.”
Ariel really wants you to make money and doing it alone with just music isn’t necessary. That’s why she encourages you to look at other things you can provide to your customers like merchandise emblazoned with your logo, private shows, cheap downloads, or free downloads with email subscriptions (which I’ve already done). But she doesn’t stop there. She’s really trying to get you to think about how you can create an ongoing relationship with your customers, engaging them into a distribution funnel that starts with the inexpensive and capturing their interest by producing more exclusive products or programs that cost more money, but provide more exclusivity to them. I think that much of the thinking behind this is concurrent with a thread that she’s been writing about based on the 1,000 true fans theory that basically encourages you to find the right number of die-hard fans that are enraptured with your output. You cater to those fans with what they love about you and it’s a win/win: They support you by buying your products and you support them by being the creative you that you are.
There are a number of program ideas that the book suggests for keeping momentum with your fans and engaging new fans. Things like special exclusive events with the band, monthly gifts, artist critiques and even a private VIP fan website. I’m going to start out slowly on this because being one artist with a full-time job, I can only do so much and I really need to build a fanbase from the publicity work I’m doing from the last 9 weeks, which unfortunately doesn’t seem to have made much of a different yet except that my mp3 sales are improving a little. But, I got a great idea from my friend, JC which is to try to sell prints of my artwork on FineArtAmerica.com. I’ve had some drawing on my website for a long time and I have hi-def slides as well so I’m gonna go get them re-digitized and post them hopefully within the week and see if I can’t sell some prints. I also have a number of drawings that are near completion that I’ll add to the mix and maybe I can combine some art sales with music sales. The proposition is exciting! So keep a lookout for that.
I also wanted to add that the end of the book has a couple bonus chapters on traditional PR and choosing the right publicist. I really found the traditional PR chapter to be quite interesting and wish that I’d seen it a long time ago. Ariel includes comments from a couple of journalists who write about musicians and gets some nice feedback from them about what they like and how they like to receive press kits to possibly write about. I’ve seen other articles along these lines but what stands out about this one is the immense detail about the press kit itself, representing that press kit on your web site, and the pertinent advice on follow-up. I myself have not done due-diligence on follow-up sometimes and I know that I’ve suffered for it. You have to do it which means you need to keep track of when and where and who you send something to and be ready to follow-up a couple of weeks later. I remember listening to a panel once of music reviewers for agencies and someone on the panel talked about their office. It had three boxes in it. The first box got all the mail-ins of CDs. If an artist made contact one time either by phone or email, someone would hunt down the CD in the first box and move it over to the second box. If the artist made a second attempt at contact or follow-up, the CD would be moved from the second box and into a box that actually sat on the reviewers desk where it would be reviewed. Sounds a little nuts until you see the wall of CDs on some people’s desks.
One thing I’m learning about the music business: It’s a little what you know, who you know, what you do… and how much endurance you have. This concludes our regularly scheduled program. Please stay tuned to find out how this big shift will play out in 2010. I’m really wanting big things to happen this year and I’m really hoping that the effort that I’ve put into this blogging contest has will pay off. I would love to be publicized by Ariel. She rawks and has truly been inspiring too me!
