badlybent.ca

Apologies to Bob Dylan for the title of this post….

Well, dear readers of this blog, the time has come for a little change….okay a HUGE change.  I’m going to be moving this blog to another page, and this page is (FINALLY!) going to become home for my record label, Badly Bent Records.  Yes, I’ve (FINALLY!) launched it, and big things are already afoot.  Sometime by Monday or Tuesday of next week the site will be flipped over to the record label site, and the blog will be moved.

Looking forward to writing more consistently again as well.  I’ll probably split this blog up into a regular blog from my own personal standpoint, as well as a blog about the music industry and the happenings in my tiny portion of it.

Take care, and we’ll see you on the other side…

Stevie Z

By Stevie Z

    Well, it’s that time of the year again: time for either myself or The Luverly Michelle™ to purchase something for ourselves.  Every year at Christmas we are ‘allowed’ to buy something worth more money then we would usually spend.  I don’t mean ‘allowed’ by each other, but more along the lines of it taking most of the year to save up the cash to purchase something that costs a little extra dough.  Each Christmas we buy each other a few smaller things, and then we alternate each year on whom gets the bonus ‘goodie’.

     Just to clarify - we’re not talking thousands of dollars here, last year I got an M-Audio MIDI controller keyboard, this year Michelle is getting a sewing machine.  These things generally amount to only a few hundred bucks.

      Since this year is Michelle’s year to get ‘The Big One’, it’s my year to get smaller stuff.  I’m always easy to buy for as far as the category of gifts go - something music-related.  See? Easy.  Where it gets agonizing is trying to decide which subcategory I’m leaning towards.  I look at it as 2 choices.

     Creation Vs. Consumption.

     Since I’m also a songwriter, and am aspiring to be a producer/engineer to some degree as well, I’m always looking at acquiring the stuff I need to achieve my goal of creating great songs, whether writing and playing my own, or helping someone else with theirs.

   While I know some people have a bad case of G.A.S. (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) wherein they’re always pining after (and buying!) the latest, greatest guitar/mic/software/effects, etc, I have a very concrete idea of what I want to achieve, and know what I need to get it.   I’ve never been a fan of newest/shiniest anyways, not when older/used/less expensive gets the job done. 

     At the other end of the equation sits Consumption.  By this I mean the act of listening to music that others have created, such as the latest Corb Lund album.   My MP3 player is an older Sansa SanDisk 8GB, and it’s starting to show it’s age.  When you think that I use it for an average of 4-5 hours per day for listening to podcasts and music in a not-so-healthy-for-electronics environment, I believe it’s held up amazingly well, and was a very good buy.  The only problems are, as I say, it’s getting older, and starting to act a little eccentric now and again, and also, for some reason nobody (including Sansa or Apple apparently) understands, my Mac won’t acknowledge the fact that it exists when I plug it in.  This means that I have to download music and podcasts to a memory stick, then use a windows (ick) based machine to transfer it to my MP3 Player.

     I know, I know.  I keep thinking it too: “Good lord you lazy bastard, 10 years ago the technology for this kind of portable music player wasn’t even within your grasp, and now you’re bitching because it takes you an extra 5 minutes to be able to perform the miracle of being able to hear whatever music you want, whenever you want!”  Yeah, it is kind of nit-picky.  And also, I feel really guilty whenever I think “man, I wish this thing was bigger then 8GB so I could have more music on it.”  I mean, seriously?  My first computer had, I believe, a 256k hard drive!  8GB is a lot of tunes.  I don’t really need an iPod….I mean, they’re neato, and shiny, and do lots of neat stuff, and if I spend enough on one (an iPod Touch, for example has music creation apps available for it) then I can kind of  bridge the gap between creation and consumption.  But we’re talking $400 plus, and I can’t really justify that, not even to myself, never mind Michelle.  Actually, Michelle is a lot more easy-going about that kind of thing. 

   So to help me decide, I asked myself the following question:

    Do I want the ability to be able to listen to Peter Judd’s songs wherever and whenever I want to, which I can already do, but make it slightly easier, or do I want the ability to help amazing songwriters like a Peter Judd or a Robbie Hancock get their songs out so other people can hear them?

     Feedback from other people who share this dilemma is welcome…..

    Stevie Z

Quick confession:  a lot of things have been getting me down over the past few months.  Don’t worry, I am going somewhere with this.  Everything from the ‘house renovation blues’ to my computer woes to the ‘issues with the misses’ to my complete and total musical block have really been taking their toll.  The real reason I think that things were getting to me, however, was that I forgot a key thing: PMA.

PMA stands for “Positive Mental Attitude” and it’s often the difference between being happy or miserable.  Someone famous once said something along the lines of “it’s not what happens to you in life, it’s how you deal with it”.  I’m not sure whether it was Ghandi, or maybe Mr. Hooper from Sesame Street.  Regardless, it’s the kind of thing that bears repeating:

“It’s not what happens to you in life, it’s how you deal with it”.

I’m not talking about walking around with a drooley smile on your face, ignoring the iceberg that you’re bearing down full speed on and simply ‘pretending’ that everything’s peachy.  That would be stupid.  I’m talking about how, when something comes along that falls in the ‘bad’ side of life, you process it and deal with it.

I’ve learned better ways to deal with crap from two people, and I’m going to discuss the first person here.  He goes by the handle of “Scarborough Dude” and you can find his blog and podcast here. (One Caveat: the language can be strong, and the opinions can be as well)

On his podcast he discusses his life:  his past, his present, and sometimes, almost begrudgingly, his future.  The two most common themes, however, are honesty and looking at the positive side of things.  His journey seems to be one of discovering why stuff happens. One of his common phrases is “what does it mean?”  I’ve tried to incorporate more of the honesty (to both myself, and others) in my daily life, and my writings.

The other part - the looking on the positive side, has been slightly more difficult.  I have had a bit of a temper for most of my life, and an urge to be ‘on top’ of things, as well as a definite bad reaction when things don’t go the way I think they should.  As you can imagine, this is not the easy road to travel.   Being a Production Manager for many years helped hone my desperate need to always be in control of everything…at all times.

Let me give you an example:  The Scarborough Dude loses half of his year’s income in one email.  He is upset, as he should be, however since there is literally nothing he can do about it, he doesn’t have a complete freak out, and he deals with it appropriately.  I get stuck in traffic, adding an extra 20 minutes to my drive and I act like someone is sawing off my right foot and have a meltdown.  In short, I’m not dealing well with stuff. Especially the little, stupid stuff that doesn’t matter in the big picture.

But, I’m getting better.  I’m starting to (slowly) learn to let go of what I can’t control.  I can’t control the weather, I can’t control other people in traffic, I can’t control my guitar strings breaking, I can’t control rude jackasses in bars braying loudly their idiot sentiments and pointless opinions on stuff nobody cares about, all while someone is pouring their heart out in a song they wrote and….oops, there I go again.

I’ve actually found, when I get into situations that start my blood pressure soaring,  and get my dander up, asking myself “What would Scarborough Dude do?“  And then, if nothing else, I get a chuckle out of it, but ya know, I also find myself more and more often just talking myself down off of a ledge I shouldn’t have been on in the first place.

So do yourself a favour - head on over to The Scarborough Dude’s website, and have a listen to a few of his podcasts.  I recommend that you commit to 5 episodes.  It takes a few episodes to get used to his particular style, and leanings.  I’ll admit that the first time I listened to his show I thought he was a hippie-wacko-pinko-lunatic.   After calling myself a fan for over a year now…..well, I still think he’s a hippie-wacko-pinko-lunatic…but I also now mean that in an endearing sort of way, and I do believe I’ve learned a few things along the way.

So, thanks Dude.

Stevie Z

It’s been a hell of a few months.  Actually, in the grand scheme of things, compared to some people’s lives, I guess I don’t have that much to complain about.  A lot of people had and have it worse off then me, so I’ll give ya’ll a brief rundown, and stop me if I start whining:

First of all, I’ve been working on home renovations.  Not huge layout-altering stuff, but over the last few months my house has pretty much been completely painted.  Top to bottom, literally inside and out.  It’s also been fixed all over the place, and decluttered like crazy.  We are now the proud renters of a 10×10 storage space that’s packed to the rafters with stuff that, for the most part, turns out we didn’t really need.

The Luverly Michelle(TM) decided that it was time we sold our house and moved.  I’ll get into more detail at some other time about why that was her call to make, but we both knew when we bought it that at some point she’d need to move.  So, we engaged the services of THE best real estate agent this side of the Pecos (we call her our Real Estate Ninja) and made the mistake of asking her for a list of stuff we should do to make the house more salable.  And, much to our dismay, she gave us a list.  A huge list.  Of course, it was our decision to do anything, but since she was the expert, we did it.  We would have gotten everything done on the list, except for a couple of things like money and time.  See, I didn’t think things through quite enough, and had relegated some things further down the list, and turns out we couldn’t do them because they were dependant on outside temperature, which was rapidly plummeting.  Ever try to paint exterior trim on a house at +3 Celsius?  Yeah, it’s a blast.

Then, while painting outside, I fell off the ladder.  Nothing too spectacular, I was only about 4 feet up, in fact, I kind of ‘jumped’ down instead of falling when I felt the ladder shift.  Guess I just landed a little bit wrong, and did something to my lower back.  You know those really annoying back injuries that just hurt enough to piss you off and keep you from doing stuff?  It was one of those.

Then after that had finally healed, I managed to whack my kneecap hard enough trying to run through a doorway (and missing it slightly, apparently) that I could barely walk for about 2 weeks, and after 2 months was still pretty sore.

Hmmm, I think I’m starting to whine now….so I’ll leave the injuries there.  Those were the major ones anyways.

Ever renovate your home with your spouse?  Well, not literally “with” your spouse - obviously you use paint brushes and hammers and stuff, but I mean alongside your spouse?  How did that go?  Yeah, it went a ton worse with us too.  Between the regular life stresses, plus extra stresses, and then the stresses of renovating a house to sell it, well, The Luverly Michelle(TM) and I were getting along about as well as two rabid marmots with PMS and hangnails, stuffed in a sack, dunked in water and then shaken vigorously.  But with less fur.  Only moderately though.

That pretty much sums up most of the crap.  I’m glad that 2008 is over with, and I’m really looking forward to 2009.  Of course, a guy who keeps getting kicked in the nuts would probably appreciate a punch in face, just for something different…..

I’ve actually got big plans, social medially speaking.  Look for The Sieve! to be back in full force in the next couple weeks, along with the possible launching of a NEW podcast.   The Sieve! Monthly Song Challenge will be back up and running in the next couple of weeks too, and I’ve tweaked it a bit based on some comments I’ve received from people.  I’m hoping to really get people writing some great stuff too - in times like this, with economic uncertainty, plus all the other crap that’s going on in the world, it’s always a good thing to create inspiring and amazing art.

I’m also helping a couple of people in getting their online presence up and running as well.   Hey, I guess I can start calling myself an expert now!  Neato. 

I’m also going to be re-launching my band that a friend and I had last year, new direction, new sound, new songs, and I’m starting to write and record again.  It’s amazing the stuff that you can accomplish when you’re not spending every spare minute and dime working on a house.  Go figure.

 So, I’ve missed you all…..well, okay maybe not ALL of you - some of you I didn’t miss one bit….and you know who you are…but the rest of you I’ve missed a lot.

Looking forward to a prosperous 2009!

Stevie Z

By Stevie Z

Okay, we all know I believe in Irony, but I also believe in Cosmic Justice and karma and all that stuff too. Here’s a good example of it in action:

I was putting together a (somewhat) substantial order for an online company that does marketing materials - I was looking for 2 sets of business cards, some car magnets, a table banner, couple of rubber stamps and some pens and keychains. Entire order was going to be a few hundred bucks.

Then, I don’t know why, I checked an old email account I used to use many years ago, but don’t really use anymore. Wow, a little over 2,000 messages in my spam mailbox. Just for the heck of it, I went into the spam box, and sorted the messages by sender. Turns out that I was getting spammed almost ONCE every TWO DAYS from this very same company that I was about to give final approval to the proofs to. This old email is a yahoo account, and I know that since I’ve only recently heard of this company that I hadn’t contacted them before with my old email address, and the old email address, as I said, has been in disuse, and pretty much anything that falls into it is spam.

So, I called the company, asked to speak to the head of their sales department, had them call up my order so that she could see what I was talking about, explained to her that I put spammers on the same level as cat excrement, and that I wished to cancel my order and I would NEVER do business with them again.

I refuse to do business with companies who use spam to sell their products or services. Not only that, but I wouldn’t even pee in their mouths if their TEETH were on fire. Harsh? Yes, but I had to delete almost 20 attempts today to spam my comments board on this blog, and have to deal with it in my inbox everyday. Just like you do. Maybe if we ALL got together and boycotted these asshats then they’d move along. That, or just start phoning them and screaming at them. That may or may not work, but damn, it’ll suuuuure feel good.

Of course, I’m just sayin’

Stevie Z

by Stevie Z

Hey boys and girls, it’s meetup time again. This time it’s in the picturesque, beautiful, lovely, gorgeous, pretty, ravishing, splendid, radiant, stately, attractive and sexy town of Niagara-On-The-Lake, Ontario Canada. By the way, Niagara-On-The-Lake shall from here on in be referred to as NOTL because Niagara-On-The-Lake is a bitch to type….

Anyways, its on Saturday, August 16th, from 9 am to 6 pm. There will be some amazing speakers giving amazing talks and Questions and Answers on amazing topics. Speakers include John Meadows , Keith Burtis, Bill Deys, Mark Blevis, Sean McGaughey, Steve “Snowball” Saylor and Jim Miles and Kristina Lively.

Head on over to niagarameetup.org and check it out, and sign on up. But hurry! Registration is limited and fillin’ up fast.

Just in case you’re sitting on the fence about it, check out this promo I did to help you make up your mind.

NOTL08 Promo

So go to their website, or their Facebook page, or their twitter page (all of which you can find on their website) and register and GO. Tell em Stevie Z sent ya…and they’ll probably look at you with puzzlement and pat you on the head in sympathy.

Of course, I’m just sayin’

Stevie Z