Sparks from the Fire

When I was a kid and would buy an album, one of my favorite things in life to do, I couldn’t wait to rush home, plunk myself down in front of our Hi-Fi and give it a thorough listen – and, of course, while listening the first time, read the liner notes.

Back then, LPs were large enough – approximately 12”x12” – so that the cardboard cover they came in could have all kinds of information about the music and the artist.  I remember to this day literally paragraphs of my Ellington At Newport (Jazz Festival) that I played and read until the grooves wore out.

Back then they even gave a Grammy for “Best Liner Notes” each year.

Then the medium began to shrink – first to the size of a CD and now to nothing more than a digital download of the cover and the names of the songs if you’re lucky.  Lost along the way were other pictures besides the cover, lyrics and especially my beloved liner notes.

Several years back when I started producing CDs regularly I tried to keep the time-honored traditions by releasing CDs with 8 to 24 page booklet inserts.  Inspirational music depends a lot on its lyrical content and I always felt it necessary to include those lyrics and especially give credit to all the musicians, singers, designers, etc. who worked to complete the project.  But the cost of the booklet became prohibitive.

Today a 4 panel booklet CD will cost $1.14 per unit from the manufacturer if I buy at least 1000.  Take that booklet to 18-24 pages and the cost soars to over $3.00 per unit.  There go the profits.

So Watchfire Music and a few other artists turned to the Digi-Book.  What is a Digi-Book?  “A Digi-Book is an electronic version of an album’s liner notes and vital information.  This downloadable digital booklet contains photos, lyrics, and notes written by the artists and producers of the album as well as all sorts of information pertinent to the experience.” (more…)

Money may not make the world go around, but it does help gather people together sometimes to give it a little push.  In this day and age of the music industry blues, sometimes that little push is needed.  In the case of Inspirational music the time is now.

Consequently we have begun a 30 day Kickstarter.com campaign to raise money to complete and promote a CD project that I’ve been working on now for over a year and a half.

It’s the making of new CD called “Goin’ Home” and a subsequent National Tour around this CD.  It involves an inspiring blend of great tradition and cutting-edge new music and deals with a very important aspect of each of our lives.

It deals with the experience at the end of our lives that we each face eventually that I like to call “transition”.

In the words of Jenny Burton, one of the project’s stars, “It’s a subject that, at first, we walk away from, but will walk towards one day, so why not walk towards it informed and without fear.”

I, personally, would like to go through that experience, when it comes, fully aware and alert, expectant joyful, and filled with spiritual curiosity.  When it comes to that transition, we Americans tend to look the other way and pretend that it doesn’t exist.  I don’t want to be like that.

What better way to prepare than to write about it.

So Goin’ Home is about Heaven and beyond.  I’ve thought from childhood that the much of the world’s perception of Heaven, though certainly idyllic, was really rather like a fairy tale or a Santa Claus story.  In a song entitled Heaven on the CD I write the following: (more…)

Barry Danielian - Trumpeter

Yesterday I had a blast.  Inspirational music took on new meaning as I recorded virtuoso trumpeter, Barry Danielian, here in NYC at Link Recording Studios.  I needed a 16 bar trumpet solo for the song, In That Great Gittin’ Up Mornin’ which is the climax song on my forthcoming CD, Goin’ Home – A Gospel Cantata – On Heaven and Beyond.

I had lost my precious musician phone book last year with all its numbers and so I called my friend, guitarist, Chieli Minucci and asked him for a recommendation of a great trumpet player who could play like the angel, Gabriel.  Chieli recommended Barry Danielian.  When Chieli speaks; I listen.  I hired Barry for the gig.

I wrote the first 4 bars of the trumpet solo for Barry to get him started and then gave him the direction to improvise the rest, to keep it Gospel, make it hot, iconic, hotter, joyful, timeless and apocalyptic.  Think, in the climax of the solo, Gabriel on acid trying to blow the roof off the moon.  I sent him home to listen to the track for a couple of days and he showed up yesterday afternoon ready to go at it, trumpet in hand.

We did 6 takes – each one discussed relating to shape, development and mood.  Barry was the perfect partner in crime.  He listened, but also brought his great ideas and mastery of his horn to the moment. (more…)

Here’s a song in demand before its time – if that were possible.  If there was ever a time in our nation’s history for a shot of inspiration, it’s now.  Leadership seems to be stuck in a very unfortunate place ruled by ego and greed.  No matter what your political affiliation or taste, you can’t be liking what’s going down out there in Washington, D.C.  It seems like we need some new ideas, some new inspiration perhaps – something beyond the human will.  Here’s where Inspirational music can definitely help.

Last week in her church service (which gets broadcast around the world on the Internet) the Missus performed a new song fresh off the presses.  It has received tremendous feedback, the kind of response that makes all the blood, sweat and tears of this industry totally worth all the effort.  I’ll have to admit that we were not prepared for this response.  Who knew that this national occurrence would come?

Julia Wade (The Missus) chose the song to fit the sermon of that particular Sunday over a month ago, but it turned out to be the right panacea for the moment.  The trouble is, it is a new song that she has been working on for her new forthcoming CD, Silk Road, due to be released this coming Christmas season.  We have no single completed; we have no sheet music to sell – yet.

So we’re going to rush this one out to you ahead of its time.  We’ll release it as a single and its sheet music in the next couple of weeks.  I guess it’s just a song that demanded its own time – not on my schedule or Julia’s, but on its own schedule.   Like a baby who comes early – once it’s born, you simply have to stop all else and deal with it no matter what.

Here are only a few of the comments that we’ve received:

“We had the great good fortune to hear you perform “Even Now” in the Mother Church last Sunday.  We were traveling and just happened to be there in Boston. We both wept, it was SO gorgeous… even my husband cried — who is a Methodist!

Is there a recording of that song available?  My husband is an accomplished guitarist and he loved the guitar music so much too. Of course your singing was a gift!

Thank you so much for sharing your beautiful singing with all of us.  We will never forget how special that was!” –Carolyn (more…)

OK, I’ll admit it.  I hit the wall.  A life in Inspirational music is stimulating, intriguing, exciting and yes, even inspiring, and yet there is a point in any endeavor where you just can’t do it 24/7 anymore.  Instead of waking up with energy towards the day, you wake up with a groan and a longing to just go back to sleep.

For me, that’s always a sure sign of wall banging.  I’m definitely a workaholic.  9 hours out of 10 I love my work.  It’s what I’d rather do than anything — especially in the studio where creation is always fascinating and rewarding.  Even that 10^th hour of basic drudgery (which probably comes with any great job) I can normally handle.  Normally.

It’s no longer “normally”.  About two weeks ago I started sleeping less to get in extra hours in order to get more done.  I hadn’t had even a full day of time off for over a year.  I thought to myself, “Well, I love my work; I can do this and get away with it.  Besides, it all needs to get done and it’s on my plate, so I’d just better work those extra hours.

Well, I found out how far I could push myself – and how far I couldn’t.

I hit the wall.

I’ve since been thinking about this wall.  Nobody runs into a wall on purpose.  We hit walls occasionally while driving our cars, while turning corners and even walking.  We hit these walls not because we mean to; nobody does that.  It hurts!  We hit walls because we’re not really watching where we’re going, because we’re not really in the moment of now looking clearly at the future.  If we were, we’d see the wall and stop before we hit it.  Duh. (more…)

5:30 PM, Thursday.  New York City.  I sit at a window bar at Dean and Deluca’s in the NY Times building eating a Greek yogurt and a bag of chips trying to figure out this Inspirational music business and watching the people pour down the street past my perch as they madly scramble towards Port Authority bus terminal trying to get home at end of workday.

People watching.  I got it from my dad who used to take us to the St. Louis Cardinal ball games when I was a kid and then sit backwards in his chair and watch the crowd instead of the game.  Never much of a baseball fan, he found it more entertainment watching the people.  He used to say it was worth every dollar of the ticket.

Now I find that I got the bug as well.  I watch over the course of a half hour at least ten thousand people rush by my window tryin’ to make it to their train, their bus, their subway.  Not one of them sees me climb into their private lives for those few seconds as they pass by.  They’re all far too intent on one thing – goin’ home.

Strangely enough, very few are on their cell phones – ignoring the phenomena of our times.  It used to be that when you saw somebody walking down the street talking to themselves, you knew immediately that he/she was a wacko.  Your guard went up.  You stepped gingerly around them or got quickly out of their way.  No longer.  Now everyone’s a wacko talking a mile a minute into cyberspace. (more…)

The WFM Listening Room played to the largest crowd in its history last night as both Jimmy Roberts and Julia Wade spun their magic.  This continuous Inspirational music event is beginning to pay off great dividends to both audiences and producers – for audiences, a trusted destination in NYC where one can go see and hear great talent on a consistent basis and not have waiters in your face all night, not be forced to eat and drink and pay for watered down drinks and over-priced food that you don’t want — and all at a vastly less expensive price.

For the producers, Watchfire Music, the evening has already paid back its initial investment in superb sound system and other ancillaries and is moving rapidly towards a day when the shows will be webcast across the world.  A T1 line (the technology one needs for webcasting large content like music and video) has recently been installed in the venue and now we are just organizing the future towards the implementation of a permanent 3-camera shoot.

People have spoken to me about franchising the WFM Listening Room – the idea of having one in every large city in America, but my feeling is, “Why do this when through the webcast we can reach everyone in the world with a computer?”  I know, there’s nothing like live music and I’m a great appreciator of that fact, but the costs, at this point, of franchising are truly enormous.  Let’s let nature take its course and see how the webcasts, a much more economical approach, will work.

In the meantime, the webcasts are still a lot to get together and require still further investment into additional equipment and staffing.  We’re on our way, but not there yet.  The prognosis is good! (more…)

The selling of Inspirational recorded music is a rough road these days.  The selling of any recorded music is a rough road and it seems that Inspirational music is no different.  It also seems that there are far too many good reasons why – so many that the problem has become very difficult to solve.  Difficult for the entire industry.

Why?  Like I said, the problem is complex.  File sharing does not help.  The fact that many now find their music free and accessible on the Internet at any time and immediately also is huge.  Sometimes I think people are just too busy to listen these days and when they can, there are a myriad free ways to do so and access what they’re looking for.

So we’re all looking at alternate ways of doing business.  At Watchfire Music we are shifting more towards being a digital sheet music company and producer of ancillary music events.  Hence the WFM Listening Room and the WFM Learning Lab.

It’s a changing time and we’re having to change with it – whether we like it or not.

These changes have required wholesale changes within the company.  Focus, leadership, staffing, direction and the day-to-day implementation of just about everything we do has come under careful scrutiny as we fight to survive in a world of evolution. (more…)