Séamus Anthony - words and music

Okay, so my CD is ready, the recording that is. It’s not perfect but it is beautiful. So I want to start getting it out there and into people’s CD players, iPods and the rest. And I want to get from here (CD not available for sale) to there (CD available for sale) in seven days by Doing One Thing Every Day. Here’s the plan:

DAY ONE: SUNDAY

Begin CD Manufacture Process

Yesterday I looked at prices to get a run of CDs professionally produced. Unsurprisingly, it costs a pretty penny and I don’t want to fork out 500-800 dollars just to end up with 300 CDs that I am sick of under my bed. That would be hard to explain to my partner!

What I want to do is make a run of 10, sell them at a profit, then reinvest the profit back in and make a run of 20, sell them at a profit, etc, etc until I have built up enough money to get a professional run of 100 or 500 done.

Some people might cringe at the idea of selling homemade music Cds but not me. I think it will add a nice touch to the product because let’s face it, mass produced CDs are just that, they lack any personal touch whatsoever. So the first thing I am going to do today is get started making 10 CDs at home. They won’t be perfect, but they will be unique little works of art, and if someone who buys one says it skips, well then they can ask me to send another one.

I will ask my partner to do the art because she is a great talent. And she doesn’t read this blog, so I am not just saying that.

I will also begin to burn the discs on my iMac and personally sign them, just because I have tickets on myself so that one day they may bring the purchaser the ability to sell them for big bucks on e-bay and go on a nice holiday ;-).

I will need to decide on a name for the CDs and do a double check to make sure there aren’t any last little tweaks I should give the mixing so that I am not overly plagued by self-loathing for the rest of my life (musicians will know what I mean by this).

I predict that getting the Cds made will take a few days; I will need to steal moments to burn them off when I can around changing nappies (diapers) and heading into the office to sell advertising space and other such drudgeries and adult responsibilities. And it will take my partner some time to design the art.

DAY TWO: MONDAY

Fix RSS subscription and add a mailing list to this blog

There is no point having a blog and attracting visitors if I don’t offer them the opportunity to return and get involved, and (frankly, from a hard-nosed marketing angle) if I don’t “gather their data”.

Now just the other day I noticed that RSS feed button up top isn’t working. I had a quick look, but I am no geek and couldn’t see what the problem is. (STOP THE PRESS! I just tried it again and it seems to work, so I dunno, maybe it’s ok, maybe it’s buggy, why don’t YOU give it a go right now and test it out for me? Leave a comment below if it doesn’t work.)

And I need a mailing list so people can subscribe to that so that I can contact them every now and then (only when I have something to say - I HATE over zealous mailing lists and usually unsubscribe if I find myself getting too many emails).

Monday and Tuesday I have to work full days in the city at the office (that’s three hours per day of commuting right there) so will have pretty much no time to scratch myself, and I am useless git when it comes to geekery anyway so I am going to ask my friend Steve today if he will fix it up for me tomorrow. Hopefully he will say yes! Otherwise I could feasibly stay up all night taking way too long to figure it out myself. We’ll see how that pans out - but it will get done.

DAY THREE: TUESDAY

Buy All Needed Materials

Like I said, busy with day job all day (and of course family responsibilities at night until I pass out from exhaustion) so have to be real about what I can do. Let’s just make it that I go to the shop and buy nice quality blank CDs with cases and some paper to print the covers on (recycled of course). This will give me an idea of what I will need to charge for the CDs to make a modest profit, although I will also need to factor in postage, and potentially other hidden costs yet to be identified. It is (admittedly boring but) VITAL that I keep a track of this.

DAY FOUR: WEDNESDAY

Organise Online Sales Systems

I will set up a CD Baby page and a way to sell to Australia and New Zealand without CD Baby (silly to send CDs to the US just to send them back again - and environmentally unfriendly). Will also explore other avenues and ebay.com as well. There goes a few hours right there, potentially.

DAY FIVE: THURSDAY

Organise Sales Page on this Blog…

…and some kind of BIG noticeable graphic on the home page to encourage people to go and look at it - and buy a CD

This may take Steve’s help again.

DAY SIX: FRIDAY

Finish Manufacture of CDs

This means my partner will need to have finished the artwork, I will need to have set up the printer (it’s been in the box since we moved house), I’ll need to print and crop the covers, finish burning the discs, and apply labels to them or print on them (ooh just thought of that, might need to do that before I burn the discs? Not sure, will research).

DAY SEVEN: SATURDAY

Post 5 CDs off to CD Baby and upload all sales material to website and announce to the world in general that they are on sale. I don’t care who buys them, even if it’s my own grandmother, but they gotta pay full price.

Then it’s time to start working on a serious CD Sales Marketing Plan, and a gig or two wouldn’t go astray either. Oh well …

One Thing at a time! Wish me luck!

Now all I need is an audience, maybe even two

Yep I have extracted the songs from my iMac and am sitting out in the Office of Imagination and Procedure listening to myself really loud while the wife and baby sleep inside the house (Duh) and thinking “this shit is cool dude, you are ok”.

Couple this with the fact that I am pretty sure that the young lady who works in the video store has thang for moi, I could still be onto something here

(Really the guy who started that wink thing has a lot to answer for - EVERYTHING I say is said with a wink).

Yeah so that’s my thing for today. Tomorrow I’m just gonna call the nearest CD burning dudes and place an order.

One Thing Every Day, dude*, what about you?

*I know too many winks AND too many ‘dudes’ but what can I do, dude, I’m like a refugee from the Bill and Ted Gen, man. And that rug really set off the room, y’know?

… Like yesterday for example, I identified the One Thing I could do which would move me closest to my goal. In this case it turned out to be calling up a friend to ask how the hell to get my tunes that I recorded in my iMac out of my iMac and onto a disc with out the sound quality turning to poo.

Well it turned out to be relatively simple, but I had been stuck on that point for MONTHS! I was intending to release these tunes properly LAST FEBRUARY! But I couldn’t get them onto a disc without the sound going all muddy and I spent hours looking for what the problem was, and hours searching through forum posts on the web and had let the whole project slide out of frustration and then …

… one tiny, five minute phone conversation was all it took.

Now I can go ahead and get a CD made, and distribute the songs digitally over the web, and all the rest.

One Thing Everyday, it makes all the difference.

Now, what will I do today? What will YOU do?

… to get some music action happening in my life again. That’s the plan. And preferably it should be the “biggest rock” (the action that will achieve the most out of the available range of possible actions) but I am pretty much happy if I do something at least. And practising* doesn’t count - this is about getting it out there. Practising is about being ready for when you are actually out there.

So today I didn’t have a lot of time but I finally managed to spend some time pimping my myspace page (yes like a big old kid).

The most exciting thing that I did there was add a RSS feature to it so that this blog gets fed into the myspace page.

Damn! Somebody might even read it! Then I’ll be in trouble!

Yesterday’s thing (similarly busy day) was that I struck a deal with Steven Mills . He is going to use me as a guinea pig for his new system of promoting yourself effectively across the web. Which means I should soon be getting heaps of eyeballs and ears checking out my tunes and mad bastard ramblings …

Not sure what I will do tomorrow … maybe something more “real world” orientated?

(*practising? practicing? I can never figure it out. And who cares really?)

Yesterday I was mooching around in the garden, organising the firewood when I found one big lump of gum that was too big to fit into the wood heater (we live in the hills so all this kind of thing is par for the course).

I grabbed my trusty axe and started chopping to split the big lump in two.

Two hours later, and after much grunting, groaning, swearing and a zillion axe blows I was still going - sweat flying everywhere, alcohol being skulled back to kill the pain, a mad glint in my eye - and my girl was starting to get a bit worried.

I knew it wasn’t the most useful usuage of my time but I didn’t care. Why? because I am a stubborn little shit and I don’t like to quit until something is bloody well done already. So I kept at that lump of concrete masquerading as wood until finally after 2 and a half hours it eventually split.

I then held the pieces of defeated wood aloft, standing admist the splintery carnage of the battle and let out a macho roar (and my girl called me a tosser - but that’s beside the point).

The point IS that I am a stubborn little shit and I don’t like to quit until something is done properly. And frankly, when I was younger I started something - becoming a professional muscian - and I didn’t finish it (for various reasons, none of them good enough) and I just can’t live with that. Call it pride. Call it stupidity. Call it what you will.

I don’t care what you call it.

You see, last November, when my baby girl was a newborn, I was staring at her sleeping in my arms and I thought to myself “What am I going to tell her? That I just gave up?”

Fuck no. I want her to learn that the persistent win, not just the talented, or the lucky, but the PERSISTENT.

So here’s the deal. Stupid and pigheaded and unrealistic as it may seem, I resolve to do at least one thing everyday to move me towards my goal of becoming a professional musician until such point as it becomes reality.

This is a big call. But I don’t need to be Bono or Mick Jagger or anything, just earn a modest living playing music. Of course if I earn zillions, then fine, that’s cool, I can roll with that…

So what did I do today? Well the single most important thing (the Biggest Rock - Google it) I did today to sit down with Steve, my partner over at Rebel Zen and start learning how to run an effective social media marketing campaign. This means I will begin to build traffic to this site. I did other things too, like buy seamusmusic.com for my “static” music site, join Twitter (despite my reservations) and cancel the hosting I have here so that I save myself $150/year (all adds up), but the “biggest rock award” for today goes to the social media marketing lesson. very powerful Over at RebelZen.com, for example, Steve rustled us up 177 unique visitors in one day in our first week of the site being “live”. As for this here blog, well I think it’s pretty much just a few everyday, but soon … things will be different (cue evil laugh) Moo-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha!

Crusty 35 year old rockers with family responsibilities and a real job are supposed to give up - right? … Yeah, right … as if …

When the music is in your blood it’s in your blood and no matter what your age you should never let it slide because you KNOW what happens then right?

You start to slowly, bit-by-bit, go completely fucking insane!

I know this, but like a lot of musos, I haven’t always been focussed enough to practice this. It’s like, one day I was always rockin’ out, or crooning a sweet ballad or whatever in front of crowds of either the proverbial man and his dog or (I kid you not) crowds as big as 5000 people, and then I wake up and although I have NOTHING to complain about (beautiful partner, baby daughter, home) BUT I only ever seem to pick up my guitar and give it a bash out in the shed late on a Friday night when I’m half pissed. Or, let’s be honest, totally pissed.

Well, fuck it, this has to change and right now.

So I will be documenting my efforts to get back on the old rock n’ roll horse right here so why don’t you get with this whole RSS thing and subscribe and follow me as I have another crack at it.

And look, don’t get me wrong, I am not an idiot, well not totally anyway, I KNOW I am too old to be some kind of teeny heart throb or whatever - but who the fuck wants that anyway? And it’s not that important to me to become some hugely famous rich dude, either (although I could try it on for size, just to see how it fits, you understand!) - I just want to play some music again man; solo, with others, in dive bars or (even better) on professional stages in front of decent, music lovin’ crowds again.

Let’s face it - what muso doesn’t want that?

The only thing that stops us is OURSELVES, man!

Time to stop making excuses and start making music again!

Ok so it’s morning now and rather than being drunk and cantankerous, I am slightly hungover and cantankerous, but this is ok.

And while I think my subheader, “diary of a crazy musician who refused to give up” is pretty darn embarrassing and lame, it does at least point to the purpose of this blog, which is to tell the story of my pigheaded decision to revive my “career” (I use the word loosely) as a musician, at the slightly crusty age of not-quite-35 and now that I am well entrenched with a baby and ‘real job’ and all those things that are supposed to make you give up on such silly adolescent fantasies.

I think I will write a static “About” post about this. so go there and read about it.

Meanwhile I have a few things to sort out, and the first is:

The Name.

back in the day, I was the only Seamus rock singer in Adelaide (I live in Melbourne now) and that was all that mattered.

Nowadays of course we compete with the entire planet for our name and frankly, there are a shitload of Seamus’s out there and they all seem to be singers. Most of them use a surname of course, but I’ve always been a bit of a tosser and preferred the single name thing, yes, like Madonna or Sting or whatever. A bit sad I know but bugger it. And anyway, do this for me, google Seamus Ennis (Ennis being my surname, not Anthony, that’s me middle name).

See what I am up against there? I just can’t be bothered taking that guy on, he got there first basically.

So I am soon to create a static site for my music, and I need to decide on a domain name for that. Here’s an email I just shot off to my mate Steve about it. I think it explains the predicament well enough:

“Hi Steve,

do you think i should call my “static” music web page, seamusonline.com or musicbyseamus.com or seamusanthonyennis.com or seamusmusic.com or any other ideas?

remember seamusennis.com is taken, although i could get seamusennis.net but more to the point, google “seamus ennis” and check out those results, bit of a battle taking all that on!

and all the just seamus.whatevers are taken, I own seamus.net.au and i could buy seamus.asia but that seems a bit silly. although we kind of are in asia i suppose.

should i just use seamus.net.au and be done with it? i suppose the decision really is do i want people to google “seamus” or do i want people to google “seamus anthony” or “seamus anthony ennis” ?

google seamus for me and tell me if you reckon we could get to the top of that lot. there is no straight seamus contender… maybe i should just shoot for that and keep chasing seamus.com, they’ll sell it to me eventually but i think it will be pricey.

Anyway, whatever, but I need to make a decision….

Well, it’s almost like this blog was a placeholder in a way, because not only have I finally got myself an actual “Office of Imagination and Procedure” than I have decided to change the sub-header of this blog in order to really focus its purpose.

I am now changing “Words and Music from the Office of Imagination and Procedure”, poetic as that may be, to “Diary of a Crazy Musician Who Refused to Give Up”, because, frankly, that’s what I am.

And there you have it.

*Twenty minutes of fiddling around with the computer (and growing increasingly agitated) later*

I was going to include a screen shot of what it used to look like but I couldn’t do it, and now I’m drunk and more to the point - I’ve run out of beer and I couldn’t give a fuck about the stupid screenshot anymore so you’ll have to look it up on the way back machine if you know what that is and are really that bored.

And I had all this other inspiring shit to say but now this whole screenshot business has just pissed me off. When did words like “screenshot” even become part of my life anyway? It sounds like some kind of technical term that only porn stars and their camera crew would know about.

And come to think of it, that’s my whole point.

But more on that later. For tonight I changed the sub-title and that’s all he wrote. So goodnight to you.

Pete, the guy with the pants on my left, just emailed this photo to me. I am the red jumper-dude in the middle. Matt is in the black Dylan t-shirt. My girlfriend at the time made those pants out of our curtains. We had no need for curtains in those days, but it seemed like a good idea that Pete cover up with something (anything!).

How’s the attitude dripping from the photo!? It must have been around 1995-96 by the look of that hair. When you’re that old young it is easy to convince yourself that you are a demi-god (and of course there’s no real reason why you shouldn’t think this).

To hear what kind of rock n’ roll this kind of attitude can produce, go here to my reckoning myspace page.

Now I am out of this goddamn office. Off home to get out my axe and rock the suburbs

Me and Peter Owen, two thirds of Reckoning (for those Adelaide types who know what I am on about) will be playing some of the old Reckoning songs (and some newbies) acoustic style at the Prince Albert Hotel 254 Wright St on Easter Saturday March 22 with Spindickle and Soursob Bob. Starts about 9.

Also I just posted a new version of one of my songs, Go Away, here at Myspace.com/seamusanthony.

Here’s a photo of me and Pete at the first new-reckoning gig we did at the Grace Emily last year. There are some videos of this up on youtube if you look hard enough but they sound pretty crap.