Get Off My Lawn.
At La Caña, Shimokitazawa, Tokyo • Colleen Raney, Genta Fukue, Takahiro Dai
I don’t mind the anachronism of playing antique music in a modern setting, but a lot of what makes a career in music possible has less to do with music and more to do with things like “SEO.” Despite my best efforts to exist hundreds of years in the past (well, musically at least; I do enjoy a modern convenience now and again, like not having polio, or dying from dysentery. Anyway.) time continues to march onward, relentlessly.
It is also painfully obvious that the music industry has changed drastically since I first got into it some 35 years ago, and extremely drastically in the last five. A career change feels a bit defeatist and what’s more, I still enjoy playing music. It’s just A LOT harder to make a living at it using the same strategies that got me here. Many things that allowed traditional music to carry on or even flourish over the generations are now obsolete. Occasionally a bit of old tech (like a blog, say) can be a sneaky way around the impenetrable almighty algorithm.
So, hopefully, you’ll enjoy these essays from time to time, now without having your inbox invaded! I’ve been writing quite a bit over the last few years and even contemplated piecing it all together into something a bit more long form — a “book,” is what they call that, evidently. But this format may suit me better after all. Mostly I’ll write about music, which may include anecdotes about my weird family. Case in point, the title of this blog.
Years ago, my dad, the Eternal Luddite, sent me a letter to tell me that someone had alerted him to an inaccuracy on my website. On a piece of airmail paper in my dad’s artful cursive was written simply, “fix a brog.” He often used his broken English for comedic effect, but occasionally things like blogs would get lost in translation. Needless to say, in the time it took the letter to reach me from Japan my brog had been fixed several times over, but his intentions were good and more importantly, the letter gave me one of my all-time favorite quotes from my dad.
More anon,
Hanz