NO MASHUPS

Everybody hates them, we’ve got to make the show special in other ways.

SUPERSTAR HOST

Elton John. He hosts the show next year. He comes out, does “Your Song,” a two minute monologue and then interstitial stuff where he’s catty and funny and himself all at the same time. He gets to sit in with one or two performers, like he did fifteen years ago with Eminem, and the finale is every star known to man doing “Bennie and the Jets.”

Every year there’s a new star host. So instead of debating who’s gonna play the Super Bowl, everybody’s going to be talking about who is hosting the Grammys. It will build excitement.

NOMINATED SONGS ONLY

You only get to sing a song that’s nominated. And we’re going to have songs that are not only pop. We’re gonna broaden the audience’s horizons.

PUBLIC INVOLVEMENT

The show must be simulcast across the country. Have a little self-respect.

And then we have the public vote on two awards. Don’t complain, the Grammys are meaningless, who cares if the public gets to choose.

Like our country brethren, who anoint the Entertainer of the Year, we’re going to anoint the Performer of the Year.

FURTHERMORE, everybody nominated in this category is going to perform on the show. And we won’t announce the winner until the very end, which is gonna force everybody to stay tuned in to find out who wins. And since there’s no tape delay for time zones, there’s no way to find out the winner in advance.

And the public is going to pick Best New Artist too, a category that’s been so bastardized, no one can understand it. Let the people decide who’s new and who deserves the award.

MORE AWARDS

I’d say to eliminate dozens of awards, I’d go down to twelve and give away all of these on TV. That’s right, all you performers winning in categories that almost no one cares about, you don’t get to take home a trophy. That’s right, non-grossing films don’t get to win an Oscar unless they can hold their own against the big boys in the big categories. Theoretically, we can expand the Record of the Year category, but that just muddies the water. Either you’re a winner or you’re not. That’s what’s wrong with our society, we give losers trophies for participating in soccer and we give performers Grammys for music that has almost no audience. Bitch away, the truth hurts.

CONCLUSION

We’ve got to add credibility to the show. How can you respect a show that features performers that are not nominated that is not simulcast that has a sideshow that gives away a hundred awards?

This is how we get people excited about music again. By making the show credible and watchable. By getting them involved.

It’s a start.

I twisted my ankle getting on the plane.

It was my fault. Everything’s my fault. Felice says I’m impatient. I travel heavy, and when there was a backup on the gateway, execs checking their carry-ons because they won’t fit on this tiny plane, I swerved to the left and little did I know there was a drop-off. Why don’t they make the gateway flat from side to side? So, my ankle crumpled and I felt the pain and I wondered what was up with me, with this ski season, it’s endless injuries, I’m feeling my age and it doesn’t feel good.

It’s not horrible. The pain is not sharp. But I’m depressed and angry and not only about my body. The weird thing about getting old is time runs out. You realize you’re never gonna accomplish so much. On some level this is freeing, assuming your bank account is deep enough to carry you through. I now understand retirement. You get old enough and you realize the rat race is just that, an endless, meaningless dash. And you realize it’s all about lifestyle and experiences, and none of us are gonna last or be remembered, it’s all gonna be buried by the sands of time.

Now I’m in Bozeman for a guys’ trip. I’m not much of a bro, I’m more of a loner or a listener to the women. And I haven’t been to Montana since 1974, after graduating from college, when I snuck back into Yellowstone on my way out west. Yes, most of the national park is in Wyoming, but a tiny smidge is in Montana. Which makes it the only time I’ve ever been here.

And there’s nothing here. Just wide open spaces. Big Sky Country as Chris Whitley so eloquently sang.

So I’m staring out the window, taking it all in, the mountains look so different up here, they’re these spines/ridges. I don’t know much about geography, but I haven’t seen stuff like this before.

And then I think back, to my youth, when I was itinerant, when I lived in Utah, it was so different!

You didn’t go anywhere! Airplane trips were long and expensive. No one traveled on a whim, not even the rich. And there was no internet and long distance was expensive so when you were off the grid, you were truly off the grid.

No one’s off the grid anymore. Everybody’s reachable, Googlable. And if you’re not connected, you’re a social outcast. Everyone expects to reach you instantly. That’s what the entertainment industry doesn’t understand with its windows and restrictions, they enrage us, we’ve got no tolerance for them.

But there was serenity in being off the grid. You could revel in your own personality and life. No one built a shrine to themselves on social media, there was no social media. Reporting was what you did over a beer at the bar with your buddies, or in the once a week or so when you called your parents collect and they called you back (didn’t the phone company ever wise up to this?) Social was one on one and no one thought twice about reading a book.

Now I’m not saying the future is not advantageous. I love being able to go cheaply anywhere. However I hate that everybody carries their life’s belongings on the plane to beat the baggage charge. Are people just cheap or are they really financially-challenged?

But something is lost in every revolution. And in this case it’s solitude and reflection.

Flying in over the Bitterroots I was reminded of that two years in Utah, of living in Vermont, going to college. When internal was everything. When I experienced new things and reveled over them privately, storing them up to share maybe decades later, if at all.

And the truth is no one cares about anyone. Everybody’s narcissistic. Or if they’re tuned-in, they want some reward for it. We’re all alone. The fact we can communicate is staggering. Ever wonder if someone feels like you do? How do you even tell them how you feel? Flying over barren land, seeing giant snowcapped mountains jutting up?

Not even 50,000 people live in Bozeman. The airport is new and civilized. Everybody on the plane was wearing boots, no one was dressed up for the occasion. This is the hinterlands.

Makes me want to move to the hinterlands.

Only the hinterlands are just like L.A. today. With Amazon, FedEx and wireless reaching everywhere.

But I did buy a book on my iPhone before we took off!

However, the reward is in socialization, and I’m hooking up with my homeys, some old, some new. The connection will enhance my mood.

We’re all looking to enhance our mood.

Have you heard the new Death Cab For Cutie track “Black Sun”?

Not “Black Hole Sun,” this is definitely not Soundgarden, and if you don’t know Death Cab For Cutie, even if you’ve never heard of them, that’s irrelevant if you like rock music, you’re gonna get it immediately, you’re gonna wonder where it’s been hiding, why you couldn’t find it earlier.

I did.

Music has become incomprehensible. There’s too much and not enough good and I don’t know where to start. The radio stations are beholden to the labels, and they’re not on demand in an on demand culture, and online there’s a plethora of material and the playlists are too long with too many clunkers and then this guy e-mails me to check out his Spotify playlist and I start listening and I’m positively stunned, he’s managed to extract the key tracks from all these bands I’ve heard of but don’t know how to penetrate.

The opening cut is by Florence + The Machine, who I certainly know but never really got, and I like this but don’t love it, and then the follow-up cut is Alabama Shakes’ “Don’t Wanna Fight” which is good but not good enough and then comes…Death Cab.

This guy picked out the one Noel Gallagher cut you’ve got to hear. It’s good. I’ve read so much hype but I don’t know where to start, now I do.

Then there’s stuff that doesn’t fly on the mainstream radar but is so infectious you wonder why it does not, like Django Django’s “First Light.”

Or how about Proxima Parada’s “Climb To Love”?

Now this playlist is not hip-hop, and it only occasionally crosses over to pop, but if you’re a rock fan, mostly without the roll, if you like that white boy music but feel that they stopped making good stuff in the seventies, before MTV, when everything became obvious, you’re gonna love this!

Now I’m telling you, there are so few tune-outs. Unlike every other playlist I check out. You see curation is a skill.

The guy’s name is “Songpickr.”

All you need to search on is that in Spotify.

Oh, you don’t have a Spotify account? What’s wrong with you? You call yourself a music fan? That’s where everybody is, where the action is, you want to be where the action is, right?

And Songpickr has other playlists, even one for Classic Rock, but the one I’m talking about is: “Songpickr: 2015 Best Songs of the Year (Indie, Rock, Alternative, Folk, Singer-Songwriter, Soul…)”

You search for it and when you find it you click to follow it and then it’s in your playlist list and click to have it sync to your mobile device, so it upgrades on the fly and you can hear the new stuff as it’s put up there.

Now I really like about 70% of the tracks. And I haven’t found a curator this good…EVER! Makes my heart pitter-patter, makes me a believer…

Makes me think music has a chance.

For you, me and EVERYBODY!
_____________________________________

I corresponded with Songpickr and this is what he told me:

I do all the Songpickr playlists but 90% of my time is spent on the “Best Songs of 2015” playlist which has over 72,000 followers today.

I started when Spotify launched in Germany in March 2012. I was one of the first users in Germany.

There was a big Coke summer campaign – one of spotify’s first brand deals – with a nationwide billboard campaign. Clue was users could upload/share their playlists on a landing page and brand them with a cover. I was one of the first users who uploaded a playlist so everybody who went to this landing page saw my playlist. By the end of 2012 I had approx 5-6k followers.

Then I made a mistake: On Jan 1st 2013 I started “Best Songs 2013” – a new playlist with zero followers while other users just renamed their playlist from 2012 to 2013 and kept their followers. Unfortunately I only recognized it when I already had 1-2k on my new playlist and I wanted to keep them.

2013 to 2014 and 2014 to 2015 I didn’t repeat the mistake but simply renamed my playlist at the beginning of the year so I could keep building my followers. A lot of users do “Best Songs of Jan”, “Feb”, “March”, etc. – all separate playlists. They will not reach a critical mass.

SEO within Spotify is important. In the early days basically every word, artist, genre, festival, etc. you put in your title or description text helped surfacing your playlist in the search results. When you typed in Bonnaroo, Coachella, Singer-Sonwriter – Songpickr came up first. Soon the discription texts were kind of abused so Spotify changed their search mechanic. Not working this way anymore.

It’s a little bit like on Youtube in the early days – everybody experiments. It is tougher now if you didn’t start early: Spotify’s acquisition of Tunigo and Echonest was a game changer. I was lucky because I had uploaded my playlist to Tunigo.com before it was acquired and shut down. After the shutdown nobody could upload playlists themselves.

I follow every artist I add on Spotify, Facebook and Twitter and contact them to tell them that I added a track and kindly ask for a post in return. Because I mostly add newcomers, unsigned artists, indie repertoire the feedback is more positive than I expected. I think they see that I love music, that I am a fan not a business. 40% of my bitly traffic comes from the US. As a rule you can say that artists who have less than 50% of my playlist followers will consider a post but artists with more followers than I have don’t even respond.

I invest more time than anyone else I know to hear, see and find music. And I want to pass on what I find so other people who don’t want to put in the same effort still get easy access to great music they otherwise would not hear on the radio or tv.

You like rock, indie, singer-songwriter, folk, americana, soul – simply follow my playlist and never miss a great song or at least always have enough fresh new music without investing a minute to find it yourself.

Some artists even follow my playlist and profile and listen to my playlist so it shows up in their activity feed.

Also users share and post my playlists via Twitter or privately. Classic word-of-mouth.

I usually do this “playlist work” before I go to bed or in the morning before I go to work. Most of the time is spent on Saturday and Sunday. In total I probably spend around 7h per week to find new music.

I listened 64,000 min on Spotify in 2013 89,000 min in 2014.

I read the relevant music magazines but they became kind of slow and outdated. I don’t want to read about releases two months after I added them to my playlists.

Blogs are better. Spotify, iTunes, Shazam Charts. Hype Machine. Last.fm – nobody talks about Last.fm since CBS acquired it but it is an incredible source for great recommendations if you have a huge “scrobble history”. I have scrobbled 124.000 tracks since 2006 so their machine knows me pretty good.

I also follow approx 200 other playlists from Spotify, Digster, Filter, Topsify, Tastemakers with similar music taste. I listen to ALL tracks they add. You can see patterns. Who copies from who for example. How tracks evolve over time. You call that “playlist seeding”.

My guess is that we will see tons of playlist promotion companies pop up over the next years – like radio, press, online, tv promotion agencies. A lot of labels already added Songpickr to their promotion lists.

In terms of repertoire I like to pick songs which are unique, touch my heart. If I personally don’t like it I don’t pick it no matter how hyped the band is. Credibility is all you have. I don’t like it to be too mainstream but also not too edgy. It should still appeal to many people. It needs to work on shuffle so nothing too extreme on the heavy or arty side. I try to have a mix of different genres that work as a collection.

Of course you need some hits on top of the list in the visible first 10-20 tracks. When I once featured too many unknown artists in the first 10 tracks my new weekly users went down by 50%. People need to see some familiar names as a reference if the rest of the playlist is relevant for them. It is a little bit like the compilation business or radio programming.

Because I like my playlist to work like a radio station I always have between 200-300 songs. Otherwise you will often hear the same songs if you shuffle. I like people to discover new music.

After approx. max. 12 month I delete songs and move them over to my archive playlists. So right now the 2015 playlist features songs from April 2014 to March 2015. It’s always a rolling 12-month-period.

And I update almost daily – at least 2-3 times per week. People see that you care about your list.

While there is time
Let’s go out and feel everything
If you hold me
I will let you into my dream

Steve Winwood was a star in the Spencer Davis Group when he was still underage and referred to as “Stevie,” frontman for the first supergroup Blind Faith, a cutting edge band leader in Traffic and then a solo star in 1981 with “While You See A Chance.” It wasn’t completely uninterrupted, there were some slow days in the seventies, but nothing like the dry spell after “Arc Of A Diver” (yes, there was a mild hit on “Talking Back Through The Night,” but the album was nowhere near as big as “Arc Of A Diver”), and then came 1986’s “Back In The High Life.”

Credit Russ Titelman, working without his old partner Lenny Waronker, he modernized Winwood’s sound, almost to the point of pop, and what emerged was a giant hit, “Higher Love.”

You remember, Chaka Khan’s exquisite background vocals and that horrible, endlessly played video wherein Winwood tried to dance. Come on, isn’t that one of the great things about MTV not playing videos anymore, we don’t have to see musicians dance (or act!) who shouldn’t? Whose talent is playing instruments and singing and…

And this being the eighties, this being long before Napster, if you heard a great track you went out and bought the album. And even though it was available on CD, “Back In The High Life” was only 45 minutes long, and each cut told a story, and the one that opened side two resonated with me, especially after my wife moved out and I had a new girlfriend.

The finer things keep shining through
The way my soul gets lost in you
The finer things I feel in me
The golden dance life could be

It didn’t last, it never does. That’s what everybody says that turns out to be true, the first relationship after a long one is the rebound. You’re so thrilled to feel that pulse again that you believe it’s forever. But it’s not. And I’d warn you not to get involved with someone who’s experienced a big breakup but you won’t listen, no one ever does, but believe me, you’re gonna get used and abused, dropped like a hot potato when your new love realizes that as great as you are you’re just not them. As bad as the end of a marriage might be, the fact you made it that far counts for something, you built something, it may have crumbled but you’re not ready to construct that edifice again, and knowing how hard it is to do you don’t want to do it with someone who isn’t right.

But for a while.

So I’m driving up PCH with my hand between her legs…

Well, it started when she called me. For every pushy guy many are waiting for a signal, and if you wink or show initiative we pick right up on it and dive in.

So we went to lunch and we started a relationship and suddenly “Back In The High Life” took on a whole new meaning. That’s right, great albums work in both good and bad moods, they’re constants, that you can rely upon, that will deliver at various times in life.

And back when cassettes still ruled, before there were even CD players in cars, you got behind the wheel of your automobile and played your favorites for your new love, which is what I did.

“The Finer Things” is not a single. It’s got this synth beginning that sounds like a beautiful morning, a sun rising over a yellow brick road that you just can’t wait to jump upon and trundle off into the future on.

And Steve starts to sing and there are so many changes, it’s a Disneyland ride, without the abrupt turns and changes of a roller coaster.

Oh, I’ve been sad
And have walked bitter streets alone

Loneliness. The scourge of life. Your records will get you through until you find someone new.

I will have my ever after

And you can’t lose your optimism, that’s death.

Please take my hand, here where I stand
Won’t you come out and dance with me

We’re all children, looking for a playmate.

Like I said above, that relationship ended. The gory details are relevant, but you’re not gonna hear them here. All I know is when I hear this song it reminds me of her.

But not only her.

When I’m feeling upbeat, when I’m starting a new adventure, when I feel confident, creeping into my brain I hear that synth intro and the words to “The Finer Things.”

I’d love to let you into my dream.

While there’s still time.

Let’s go!

P.S. Will Jennings wrote the words to “The Finer Things” and John Robinson played drums and a bunch of people you don’t know fleshed out the tracks and it oftentimes takes a village to make a masterpiece, when we all come together it can be a beautiful thing.

Rhinofy-The Finer Things