Thanks for being so gnarly, 2017, I guess

It's been a nutty year. Looking back on it is like looking down into a swamp that's so dense with biodiversity that it's hard to tell what exactly it's made of. The individual events are hard to remember because there were so many that were so heavy. Layers of decaying plant matter that smell really bad but create a wealth of nutrients for... our imaginations, I guess?

To be clear, I'm really speaking about the state of our country and world, not as much about my own life. My life is pretty damn good. My parents had health scares but they're doing really well now, under the circumstances. My band had great opportunities and creatively fertile experiences. The times are just interesting, and not always in the good way.

Interesting times make for great art, though, and I'm grateful to have been inspired by so much music, film, television, and literature this year. My own creative brain goo has been poured into what will become Progger's fourth album, "Dystopia," which will be released on Ropeadope Records this coming March. Progger had a remarkable year in a lot of ways: we made a record, we went to several new cities, including my hometown of Albuquerque, and we got to open for some of our heroes, George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic. We had a blast in Montreal and Toronto, stayed with friends in Cincinnati, hung with My Morning Jacket in Louisville, played for a bunch of old-school prog rock fans in Chicago (at the amazingly-named Progtoberfest), and spent some quality time in our binary home-bases of Austin and New York.

2018 is going to bring some exciting things, too. We'll be playing some new festivals, releasing new videos, cranking that new Ropeadope release out, and undoubtedly getting into some road shenanigans while finding new sounds to get excited about.

But 2017 isn't done yet and I have a few more public shows that I'm excited about. Here they are.

Dec 11: with Progger at Rockwood Stage 1, NYC! 10pm set. Right after Ryan Scott and before Nicky Barbato. Gonna be shredtastic.

Dec 18: with the Ross Pederson Electric Jazz Romance Explosion at the 55 Bar in Manhattan! Late set. Julian Pollack, Dave Cook, Sam Minaie, Ross Pederson, and yours truly.

Dec 19: with Mente Clara at Silvana in Harlem! Brazilian jams for dat booty.

Insufficient updates for an extremely busy year

I'm gonna update more than once a year. I promise. For real. And a lot's happened since my last post on this website that I stubbornly insist on refusing to upgrade. It gets the job done. See all the slick embedded media players? What else do I really need? Multiple pages? Calendars? Actual functionality? Sure, those would help. But that's what the Progger site is for. Right?

Regardless, here's some stuff that's happened:

We made a bunch of videos for tracks from the third Progger album, "Scattering," which the amazing label Ropeadope Records graciously agreed to help us release. They're all at our YouTube channel, and so are a bunch of demo videos for some sweet EarthQuaker Devices pedals.

https://www.youtube.com/user/progressmusicaustin/videos

We went on some tours and made new friends in Colorado, New Mexico, Quebec, Ontario, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, New York, Texas, Tennessee.... we got around a bit over the past year.

Some of us played some Progger jams and some other funk and soul tunes for a cool crowd of people in Anaheim, California, as part of the NAMM Bass Bash festivities. Bryan Ladd led the group most capably, and he, Carter Arrington, Bob Lanzetti, Nick Semrad, Jason Patterson, and Biscuit Rouse played the hell out of everything. It was fun.

We, like, recorded another album. It's in post-production for the next few months and then we'll start putting videos out. The whole thing will be available through Ropeadope Records early next spring.

As I type this, I'm sitting in a coffee shop in lower Manhattan around the corner from the legendary Rockwood Music Hall, where the NYC Progger squad will be playing as part of a pretty all-star lineup of homeys: Maz, Ryan Scott, Progger, and Bob Lanzetti.

I met Maz and Bob seventeen years ago and we still get to play music together. That's weird and awesome.

Lots more sweet Progger activities will be happening this year before the new music starts getting cranked out, so follow us on your social media platform of choice (@proggermusic all over the place) or, even better, sign up for the email list.

With luck I'll be offering some more thoughtful updates and ideas on this site in the near future, but no promises. :-)

Technology, the '70s, and convincing people to care about art

Technology is fun. I've been a fan for a long time. I got hooked when my dad put "Beyond Dark Castle" on our Macintosh in, I’d guess, 1987. Tonight I'm on a much newer Macintosh that runs on batteries and connects to the sum of human knowledge through a radio signal at Brooklyn Bowl while I eat really good fried chicken and drink really good beer. (The beer was made next door at the Brooklyn Brewery.) Overall, I think I'm pro-technology for a lot of reasons that would be easy to support in a public debate. 

But for every set of problems that technology solves, a new set of unexpected problems will arise, and this is pretty normal. An example that strongly hits home at the moment: I have, via this newish portable Macintosh and miraculous internet connection, access to most of the great music ever recorded by humans, and there’s more of this amazing music being created constantly. Every Friday a bunch of great new work gets unleashed upon the world via releases on Spotify, Bandcamp, iTunes, and all the increasingly-obsolete traditional methods. My own group partook in such a ritual not even two weeks ago, and I think what we unleashed was pretty good. This is undoubtedly a great situation to be in and a great time to be alive as a music fan. 

(Trivia note: for years, Tuesday was the official release day for music in the United States, as Friday is for films. The rest of the world, however, was releasing music on Fridays, and had been for many years, and on July 10 of 2015 the United States finally joined that trend.)

The corresponding problem isn’t even really a new one, it’s just newly augmented by the unprecedented wealth of great music out there and its equally unprecedented accessibility. With all of the strong options available, it’s more difficult than ever, as an artist, to get people to care about YOUR work, specifically, even if they’re the type of people who will indeed be very receptive to and appreciative of it.

I don’t have hard data to back this up at the moment (although I easily could— keep in mind, most of the sum of human knowledge is a web browser and a few search keywords away from my screen right now), but I would wager that the music industry has always been a pretty brutally competitive place. Many of my favorite bands happened to start in the 1970s: the Police, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, and Parliament/Funkadelic, among many others. All of those groups contained seasoned, skilled, world-class musicians who had spent a lot of time refining their craft before they ever tasted success. But I would also wager that it would be nearly impossible for any one of those groups to achieve the indisputably legendary status they enjoy today if they had started in, say, 2006, regardless of their ability, experience, and irreproducible genius. 

Technology isn’t going anywhere, and we have no choice but to acknowledge and even embrace the changes that it’s brought about. And because of the state of technology today, I’m able to enjoy amazing-sounding recordings by some of my favorite independent and/or up-and-coming bands, many of whom are friends of mine, and NONE of whom would be able to make recordings of this quality in the 1970s without the support of major labels. (I’m referring to the likes of the Funky Knuckles, Hildegard, Knower, and Breastfist in this paragraph, but the above could apply to multitudes of others.) It might be harder for these bands to receive the worldwide acclaim they deserve today as opposed to if they had reached their current quality level in 1979, but they’re doing a damn good job nonetheless.

And, of course, I have no choice but to spend a good deal of time dwelling on how this affects my own project, Progger, that I’ve devoted a huge chunk of my life to developing over the last five years, and that I will continue to devote my life to for the foreseeable future. We’ve had some amazing opportunities recently: we released our first album with a record label, Ropeadope Records, who are amazing; we have inquiries coming in about gigs in Europe and Asia, and we’ve sold albums in many countries on several continents— a modest number of albums, but still really exciting; we’ve gotten radio play in London, Cape Town, and who knows where else. Still, it’s still hard to fill rooms and break even on tours. That’s going to be the nature of things for a while, and I know it’s simply because people have more options than they’ve ever had, plus easy access to those options. 

Convincing people to care is tough. I’m often one of the people who needs convincing. There’s plenty of amazing art (music, film, fiction, nonfiction, television, paint, sculpture, who knows what else) that I SHOULD care about that I don’t. But I really hope that I’m convinced, eventually, just as much as I hope to do some solid convincing.