Weclome, new visitors! Here’s the lowdown. I’m an indie singer/songwriter of the soul persuasion. I write, record, and mix all my own stuff. There’s a vaguely Prince-like vibe to some of my harmonies, but I also claim D’Angelo, Rufus Wainwright, Steely Dan, The Beatles, Jeff Buckley, and dozens of others as influences.

I put out an EP called If We Were on September 30, 2008. It’s available on iTunes and on CD. Sweet Reprise, the song from the video, is on it. You can hear other bits of it below.

The first song you’ll hear, Far Side of Town, is under a Creative Commons nc-by 3.0 license (with the rest of the album soon to follow). This means I’m giving it away! You can take it, share it, remix it, and share what you’ve made, as long it’s noncommercial use, and you link back to my site. To download it, and get the full details, go to http://arthurthefourth.com/far-side-of-town/.

I’ve had this blog since June 2003. It’s taken a lot of shapes since then, but it’s starting to settle into one that I like. An exploration of the creative process and the struggle to become something more than I am. I’m sure many of you can relate.

Have a look around! If you like what you see (and hear), leave a comment. If you want to keep seeing it, subscribe to my RSS feed. If you want to hear more, join my mailing list. I’ll keep you posted about live shows, and send out occasional goodies that don’t appear on the site!

歓迎!

[Update: If there's no iTunes Music Store where you are, you can also get If We Were on Lala, Napster, or eMusic.]

I’ve learned a few things since the last time I wrote. I put out that EP I’ve been going on about. If We Were, it’s called. A fitting name for an album that came from a place of hope, a place of wondering why things weren’t the way I wanted them to be, why I wasn’t the way I wanted to be, and thinking about how it would be if I were.

As you’ve probably heard before, you can buy it if you like. On iTunes, or if you prefer the CD, on the new rxlngr online store at 21bizarre.

But I digress. I started telling you what I’d learned, and right when I was getting to the good part, I started plumping my record instead. A vicious and sneaky tactic, I know. But don’t worry; I’m planning to tie it all together.

As it turns out, when you put out an EP, people tend to look the other way. Or if they do look, they position it at just the right distance from their bodies (you might want to pull out your protractors to get a proper visual on the angles involved) that they can look straight down the bridges of their noses. Why, this is only 24 minutes of music! It’s barely enough for a snack! Harumph! Excuse me while I adjust my monocle!

This is, of course, my roundabout way of saying that I haven’t seen the reaction I was hoping for in the two months it’s been out. We’ve sent out press releases, mass e-mails, song snippets, you name it. So far, no reviews. Everyone seems to love the record, but nobody wants to talk about it.

Ssssssssshhhhhh!!!

So I’m revisiting my goals here. What am I looking to do now that the album is out? I want to put out a new one – the working title is “In The Days.” I want to work with some of the awesome musicians I only know through my iPod. I’d like to do a tour sometime soon, and I’m doing some deep thinking about the structure of my live band. In my wildest dreams, D’Angelo finally returns with the album of the century, and we follow him around, giving the audiences of the world one last sweet kiss before he utterly demolishes them. And instead of pursuing these things, I’m still sitting around waiting and wondering. What if? If I just? If we were?

So my attention is shifting. Perhaps I’m falling into the standard new artist trap, but I’m starting to favor attention over sales. Potential income over actual. Big future over little present. And I’ve been spending a lot of time over at New Music Strategies, which could convince anyone to give away the store.

With that in mind, I’m taking one small step into the brave new world of 21st century music promotion. I’m opening up the first track on my album, Far Side of Town. I’m giving it a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license, and making it free for download.

A what now? What exactly does this mean?

It means you should take it.

Go ahead, it’s OK. Download it. Link to it. Feels good, doesn’t it? Like stealing, but with rules.

If you like it, share it with your friends. Or make a remix or a video or some crazy new media art piece, and share that with your friends. Or post it on your website, or your Facebook, or your Twitter or something. Whatever you want to do, as long as you give me credit, and don’t make any money off of it. (But hey, if you want to talk cash, you know where to find me.)

There’s been some buzz around the blogosphere today about so-called “viral content.” And I agree with most of what’s being said. I worked on music for a video project a while back where the promotional plan basically consisted of “we’re gonna make it viral on YouTube.” And all I could think was, I would never send this to anyone; how do you have a virus that isn’t contagious?

But I realized after reading those entries that there is one element that you can control. Putting it out into the wild. As Mike Arauz says, “Remove every possible obstacle or challenge that may get in their way.” If people want to share, they’ll share. That’s on them. But if they can’t share, because it’s too hard, or you haven’t given them anything, they won’t. And that’s on you.

So here’s something to share. Do what you will.

Far Side of Town

Here are my favorites from the gig:

Credits:

Arthur Lewis: vocals, piano Marie Lewis: vocals, tambourine, glockenspiel Kyle McEneaney: guitar, vocals Matty Fasano: bass, vocals Brady Miller: drums

On the subject of timing, Questlove in a recent blog entry:

and FEELING is something you aint getting now. this is why i fucks with Rell….even in his program shit and cats telling me “it sounds like a 3 year old programed it…..you don’t hear the chorus rushing on beyonce’s “Green Light”?! that IS the point! that is what made prince the shit: embracing electronics but STILL maintaining a HUMAN feel. all them flaws Pharrell got in programming and chords and whatnot is the VERY thing i like about working with him.

And then

before i met Dilla i too felt out of place cause all the drummers from these parts of town were as perfect as one could get. and here i go tryna approximate some part time drummer from the backwoods of TN who probably played on a trash can drum kit all off beat—but that is what made my personality. FEELING!

Now I’ve never been a big fan of the Roots, but Questlove is without a doubt my favorite drummer. His work as a musical director is awe-inspiring (Dave Chappelle’s Block Party? Jay-Z Unplugged? Voodoo Tour?!!!), and his knowledge and understanding of the music of the past few decades is truly terrifying.

I’m not saying this to blow smoke up his ass – there are plenty people on MySpace doing that already – I’m trying to illustrate just how heavy it was for me to read that. This is a question I’ve been struggling with for a long time, and it’s become more and more important as I start to revisit some of these songs and fill in the cracks. The last time I talked about it, I was still vacillating. I knew I shouldn’t work so hard to clean up my “mistakes,” but it was just so hard to listen to them and think about other people listening to them critically.

But Questlove is so so right. And it was just what I needed to hear, just when I needed to hear it. Because Far Side needs to be loose and sparse on the verge of falling apart in order to work, and before today, I was too chicken to make that happen. Too concerned about it not sounding “professional” enough or “slick” enough.

But you know what? I have to do what I do. My music is my music. My feeling is my feeling; my flaws are my flaws. I’m going to make this album my way, and some people are going to hate it, and I am going to take that as a sign that I did something right. I’m psyched.

Oh yeah, worked on Far Side today. Piano parts blah blah blah drum programming yackity-shmackity.

Over and out.

But it’s turning out well. It’s meant to be haunting, and working on it for hours today has gotten me into a very weird place. Sort of sad and hopeless, but at the same time knowing that it’s only because I’ve really immersed myself in the song. That everything is in fact OK.

Bizarre.

Also, Arthur and the Geniuses have our first gig tomorrow night. Just a few songs, but stage time nonetheless. I think it might be my sister’s first onstage performance ever, or at least as an adult, so I’m excited for her. She’s gonna rock. We’re all gonna rock.

Rock.

It started life, as many of my songs do, as just a musical idea that I fleshed out in Logic with nonsense lyrics. Then I added some lyrics so that I could start performing it, but I found that the way the original was recorded, as much as I liked it, didn’t work live. I had to change the melody of the chorus and revamp the structure.

So now I have these two very different versions of essentially the same song. That’s what happens, I guess, when you make the switch from a virtual band of unlimited instruments to a group of 1-4 actual people. But the question becomes, how do you reconcile them? Do you treat the live version like a software fork, letting each one develop separately based on its own needs and trajectory? Or do you try to combine the two, making one master version that will work in both settings?

Hmm. More on this as it develops.