Ethan Waldman

Steeeeeve

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 08:19:01 -0700

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Trip to Portland

Sun, 08 May 2011 17:06:26 -0700

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Back in the Studio!

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 12:29:21 -0700

p845.mov Watch on Posterous

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The Tenacious D of Twitter: @wesignyourtweets

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 13:56:11 -0800

It's great when musicians come up with a creative outlet for their talents. "Dude, you should totally write a psychadelic folk pop concept album that re-tells Herman Hess's Siddartha". What I love even more, is when musicians come up with a creative outlet for their talents that they actually can tackle. Kevyn Smith and Jeremy Johnson, otherwise known as @wesingyourtweets have done just that.

Here's how it works. Whenever they feel like it, they choose a batch of tweets that they like and set them to music. There's definitely a formula here combining two acoustic guitars with tight harmony. Think Tenacious D meets Crosby Stills Nash and Young. They've even created their own lingo. You can check out their website at: http://wesingyourtweets.posterous.com

Here's one of my favorites:

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Music Across the Years

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 07:38:10 -0800

It always amazes me how music can connect people and families across generations. Last night was no exception. I performed as part of a songwriters circle with Justin Levinson and Mike Clifford at Higher Ground. Each musician played one song at a time while the others watched on stage. We all played well and were well received, even joining forces for the last song, a cover of Dead Flowers by the Rolling Stones.

When I played my song, Phantom Compositions, I told a little more of a story then usual. "It's a song that was inspired by a dream about my Uncle", I explained. "He died when I was just one, so I don't remember him. But he was a talented pianist and actually played keyboards on Billy Idol's Rebel Yell and toured extensively with Robert Palmer in the early 80's."

Later in the set, while Justin was playing, I looked down and saw that his phone had lit up with a text message from his father: "Ask Ethan if his uncle's name was Jack". The rest of the set, my head was spinning, excited to talk to someone who knew my uncle.

It turns out, Justin's father had played in a band, The Photons(?), with Jack for almost two years. They were very close to a record deal with Columbia when the guitar player broke things up. He didn't socialize with Jack much outside of the band, but said he was a talented pianist, and a great guy to work with.

So, here I am 30 years later and 400 miles away in Burlington, VT, on stage with the son of a guy who played music with my uncle. It's a small world.

A couple of years ago I discovered that there was a bunch of concert footage from one of Robert Palmer's European tours that had Jack in it. Here's Robert Palmer performing Johnny & Mary. Look for a shot of Jack right around 0:59.

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Amazing Songwriting is Amazing

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 12:43:17 -0800

Here's a quick post to pay homage to one of my favorite artists, who also happens to be a big influence for me when it comes to musical style and songwriting.

The Decemberists new Album, The King is Dead is absolutely fantastic. They have left the prog-rock-ishness of The Crane Wife and The Hazards of Love behind, and left us with 10 songs. Americana meets the Decemberists. My favorite track on the album has to be the last one. Dear Avery is haunting and wistful, and is best enjoyed when you decide to start the whole album over again after it's finished.

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In The Studio!

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 05:18:32 -0800

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Here's a little Christmas Surprise- I'm working with friend and neighbor Sam Johnson in a slick little recording studio in the South Burlington Arts District.

I tracked a new tune last night, tentatively called "Get This Going". We're also planning to tackle "Phantom Compositions", an older tune of mine that's never found its home in a recording.

As always, make sure to sign up to receive free mp3's of these new songs when they're available.

Until next time..

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In The Studio, New Recordings on the Way.

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 14:36:42 -0800

Here's a little Christmas Surprise- I'm working with friend and neighbor Sam Johnson in a slick little recording studio in the South Burlington Arts District.

I tracked a new tune last night, tentatively called "Get This Going". We're also planning to tackle "Phantom Compositions", an older tune of mine that's never found its home in a recording.

Make sure to sign up to receive free mp3's of these new songs when they're available. Or you could pay for them in the iTunes store... Your choice.

Until next time..

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Week 7: List Building Animal. #msi9w3

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 18:31:00 -0800

photo

It appears that life has gotten in my way once again and distracted me from finishing the Music Success in Nine Weeks Challenge blog posts in time. However, this doesn't mean that I'm giving up!

What got in the way?

My first tour in a long time. Though it was more of a "mini" tour, 4 nights in a row was the best I could manage juggling a full-time job.
Family, family, family. Visitors, visiting, going, coming, seeing, saying goodbye. You know the drill.

Week 7 is all about building the email list. At my last show of the tour I did the free CD/email raffle with great success! Before the gig, I printed up some business card sized pieces of paper that just said "Name" and "Email" on them, along with a big mason jar. One of the cafe employees offered to pass the jar around with the slips of paper and I had near 100% participation! This is WAY more effective then anything else I've ever done at a live show to get emails. If you other musicians haven't given this a try, I'd highly recommend it!

Meghan Morrison and I also did a "list swap" of sorts, by mentioning each other in our newsletters. Of course, my newsletter was kind of vanilla and her's was a choose your own adventure mini-novella. Thanks for suggesting it Meghan!

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Nate Marshall. Rock.

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 17:40:00 -0800

Taken at Bee's Knees

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Week 6: Mailing List Malaise #msi9w3

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 14:30:00 -0800

Welcome to week six of the Music Success in Nine Weeks Challenge. If you're new here, this might help. The mailing list is an area with a huge opportunity for improvement for me. Here's what the current state looks like:

I'm not promoting it enough:

My fledgling mailing list has been hovering around 40 members for quite some time. I always tell myself that I'll promote it at my next show, but that lonely piece of paper on the clipboard somehow always gets left at home.

I'm not contacting it enough:

I KNOW I'm not giving my mailing list enough attention because I've had more than one comment from actual fans who are on the list ask me where I've been and why they haven't heard from me! You'd think this would be enough to push me to contacting the list, but it's not. I fear it. I'm so on top of my own email and am SO unforgiving of mailing lists, that I'm worried that I'll do something wrong and suddenly everyone will unsubscribe. The reality of the situation is that most people probably aren't as militant as me when it comes to reducing the inflow of mail.

Since I am but a novice at mailing lists and there has been some fantastic dialogue in the Mastermind community, I'll share some of the nuggets of wisdom that have been flying around:

Newsletters are like Country Music: Nothing beats Country when its done exceptionally well - and nothing could be worse than a bad Country song - Erica Leigh

Here is a new idea I have been using. In the middle of our set last night in Nashville I asked everyone to pull out their cell phones. I made up a song that uses my phone number in it and told them if they texted me with their email I would send them a free MP3 and put them on the mailing list. It worked! MY phone blew up...and guess what, NOBODY SIGNED ANY OF THE 6 EMAIL LISTS THAT WERE OUT ON THE MERCH TABLES> it was a showcase and nobody was buying CDS or signing email lists. I got more emails then anyone else! - Hudson K

Improving my Communications:

Ariel asks you to take a look at your current mailing list and answer some questions about them in order to start targetting the people who are actually on your list and get better responses. Unfortunately, I think my list is so small that there are no real trends appearing. My plan is to reach back out to my existing mailing list using Ariel's guidelines, and making tweaks based on their responses.

The Technical Stuff:

FanBridge:

I've been using FanBridge for over a year now. It's free and they offer nice extras like fan questions and gig listings imported straight from ArtistData. There are two areas lacking for me with fanbridge though - one is the freebie giveaway - they only allow one song and I'd like to give away a few. The second is that I find their widgets to be unattractive and not so easy to make 'fit' into your website. I think the ReverbNation Widgets are really appealing- especially the free download one. Unfortunately, you have to use ReverbNation's mailing list if you want to use their giveaway. And since Fanbridge gives you way more for free, I'm sticking with them for now. Thanks to Kelly Carpenter for his advice in the forum about tweaking the FanBridge HTML to make it look nicer. I implemented this on my homepage and am now happy with how the FanBridge widget looks/performs.

ReverbNation Beware:

I wanted to take everyone a minute to warn everyone about ReverbNation's mailing list. I opted into the free version of FanReach to compare it to ArtistData. Before doing so, whenever I got a new fan, ReverbNation would email me their contact info with instructions to add them to my external mailing list. Easy. However, once I enabled FanReach, new ReverbNation fans get added to my FanReach mailing list. They get a confirmation email from ReverbNation/FanReach even though this isn't the list I want them to be on. Now I have to go into ReverbNation to get new fans email addresses. No big deal, right? Just turn off FanReach. Well... There is currently no way to back out of this. Don't believe me? See my discussion with one of their support staff here. Moral of the story: Don't opt into FanReach unless you plan on going with FanReach for your mailing list. Otherwise, you'll be stuck with two lists like me.

Closing Note - I'm headed to iTunes!

And Finally, I didn't want to end this week on a negative note: I finally decided to send my 2009 Self Titled album into CDBaby/iTunes/etc. I think I've spent the last year convincing myself that the recording quality wasn't good enough. Today I decided, "what the hell". Plenty of people have bought the disk from me in person. They like it. They compliment it. It needs to be available in more places. I paid my $39 and put 5 cd's in the mail to CDBaby headquarters in Portland, OR!

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Whatever you do, don't listen to this song on thanksgiving!

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 15:55:42 -0800

Just Kidding!

I was trying to think of what I could do to thank all of you for reading and listening, and realized that I have an unreleased song. It even has the word Thanksgiving in the lyrics.

I always thought that there was something missing from the song. I asked my brother, Jesse, to add an accordion part- which he did quite masterfully. So, enjoy the song and have a great Thanksgiving!

P.S. I'm also making it available as a free download in exchange for your email address (I will never, sell or spam your info). Just click download and you'll see instructions.

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Week Five: Blogging #msi9w3

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 09:21:00 -0800

Okay, this blog thing isn't so hard. In fact it's quite simple.

Why blog?

One. Artists whose music gets blogged about sell way more albums.

Two. The more you get bogged about directly corresponds with how much you sell

Three. You need to participate in the blogging world in order to get blogged about.

How to Get Started

Ariel recommends that you find 50 music blogs that cover music like yours and add them all to your blogroll. 50 is a bit of an overwhelming number for me so I decided to start with 10. Aside from adding them to my blog roll, it is also recommended that you start following these blogs and commenting on them regularly. You can't expect a blogger to talk about you without having shown an interest in what they do. I'm going to make it a goal to have at least 2 interactions per day on music blogs that I'm targeting.

To speed things along, Arielle recommends some additional tactics. First, make sure you find and thank any bloggers who have already written about you. Just search for your name in one of the blog search engines and start from there.

Is your search coming up blank? No problem. Search for an artist that you have previously played with and find blog postswritten about them. Connect with those bloggers. I have a list of artists that I've played with and will be working through the list over the next couple of days.

Finally search for blog posts about bands that sound like you and interact with them.

Building a System

I've added my targets to my blog roll and subscribe to their RSS feeds in my Google reader account. I'm going to make it a goal to make at least two comments per day for the next two weeks and see where that gets me. I've also been diligently adding friends from the music success in nine weeks challenge, pod casters, and anyone else I know what the blog to myblogroll. I've noticed that this usually sparks reciprocation and you get added to their blog roll.

In Conclusion

This week's assignment is going to require a lot of ongoing work! Breaking it down into little tasks like posting 2 blog comments will make it all manageable!

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Happy Friday! Here's a cover of The Velvet Underground's Femme Fatale

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 17:58:00 -0800

via youtube.com

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Photos from Block Gallery Open Mic

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 14:53:44 -0800

Thanks to Abbi for coming, singing and documenting the afternoon!

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Podcast Play

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 13:45:56 -0800

Thanks to Ed Ovitt for playing 'Take it Away' on his podcast, Ed's Mixed Bag. The title doesn't lie, this is a really eclectic selection of music, and I enjoyed listening!

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Week Four: Social Media for Musicians #msi9w3

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 17:21:00 -0800

Let’s get social. Having deemend my website sufficient in Week 3, it’s time to get rocking in the social media space. For those of you who may be visiting for the first time, I’m taking part in a challenge to read and implement the advice in Music Success in Nine Weeks by Ariel Hyatt. It’s cool because lots of other musicians are doing the same thing as I type this, so we’re forming a community and helping eachother through. I digress.

Week 4 of the challege is all about Web 2.0. If you’re unfamiliar, this chapter gives you a crash course in all the different types of Web 2.0: Social Networking, User Contributed Sites, Self-Publishing like Blogs and Podcasts, and Tagging / Social bookmarking. Last time through, I skipped over the part of the chapter that explained what these things all are because I’m already pretty familiar. This time, I’ve decided to go through all the material in depth- So I’ve gone back and reviewed all the great videos and resources Ariel points out.

Widgets- These are little Web 2.0 boxes that you can embed around the web that contain things like music players, email list signups, and the like. Ariel keeps recommending ReverbNation, which I’ve been resisting. I already have my mailing list through FanBridge, which is great and free. I don't like that ReverbNation imposes a 500 character limit on it's free email list- I'm undecided whether I'll migrate my existing list to reverb nation or not.

Twitter- I’m already there with a nice brand-matched profile. Ariel recommends using twitter search to start following keywords that relate to you and your music. This is something that I didn’t do last time. I decided to start with the keywords that I have in my pitch- Radiohead and John Lennon. I also added in Gibson (the type of acoustic guitar I play), and a few other bands that I like: The Decemberists, and Elvis Costello. I’m going to make it my game plan to try to interact with a handful of new people from this column each day. Obviously, my hope is that they’ll check out my profile when they see my response and who knows- maybe they’ll become new fans.

Facebook: I’m already there, but don’t have any fancy widgets installed. I’m feeling iffy about ReverbNation, but definitely recognize that I need something better then what I currently have (nothing/the crappy facebook music player). Ariel also recommends using the Flickr to Facebook plugin to sync photos between the two. However, my website is built using the blogging platform Posterous, which automatically posts everything to both Flickr and Facebook. I have ultimately decided to go with the ReverbNation addin for my Facebook page.

Flickr: Again, I'm already there. However, I never really used it as a place to market myself as a musician. I uploaded a bunch of photos to get things started. The Flickr Uploader was really helpful in getting this done quickly. I wish ReverbNation had some sort of bulk upload feature like this- it would make things MUCH faster.

Podcasts- I embraced this medium full force last time around, and even got a play on a really cool after-hours podcast.. I tried and tried but was unable to contact the guy who hosted the podcast.. his contact info is nowhere to be found! This time around, I'm adding additional material in hopes that I can attract new podcasters. Does anyone have tips for how to get more podcast play?

ToDo List:

-Meghan Morrison blogged about having potential fans connecting with her personally on Facebook rather than her fan page. I turned off Facebook emails alerting me of new friend requests long ago. However, I'm going to re-instate them so I can track them in Gmail, and remember to suggest my music page to any new friends I make

-Figure out what to do with my mailing list: Migrate from FanBridge to ReverbNation or not?

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Week Three: Optimizing My Website #msi9w3

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 18:02:00 -0700

I've done a lot of work this week on the #msi9w challenge. For those of you who don't know, I'm participating in a 9 week challenge with a number of other musicians following Ariel Hyatt's book, Music Success in Nine Weeks. Chapter three is short, but it is deceptive. There's a lot of work described in a few words!

The main recommendations are:

Add your pitch to your homepage

Check. I used to have my pitch in the banner- but given how fickle I've been with my pitch, I decided to make the banner neutral, and put the pitch at the top of my sidebar.

Site must load in 3.5 seconds

Check. My home internet connection is crappy, but with a good connection the site loads very quickly.

No flash intros

I already hate flash intros, so check. I also hate sites that auto-play music when I open them. Like most web browsers these days, I open multiple links at a time in tabs- so when music starts playing unexpectedly and I can't find which tab it's coming from, it's annoying.

Give away a free mp3 as an incentive to sign up to your mailing list

I implemented this last time 'round and have had a few signups already! I'd definitely like to make the box more attention grabbing. Any feedback from my peers would be much appreciated!

Have a consistent look and feel around the net

This is the one that took a lot of work. I feel like a new social media / music promotion / sharing website pops up every week. I've signed up for some and skipped others, but that is still quite a few websites to take care of. I updated my Facebook, Myspace, Last.fm, and made a custom Twitter background. I still need to take care of my T61 profile.

Special message to MySpace: Dear MySpace, The day that you cease to be an important online venue for music promotion will be celebrated by me and all of my fellow DIY musicians who have better uses of their time than to wrangle with your awful, advertisement laden excuse for a user interface. Never have I loathed a website so much. 'nuff said. Love, Ethan

Realizations from week 3:

-I need to do get some graphics work done for branding.

-I need to write myself a bio. This is something that I've always procrastinated on!

Also: Something about the stress of this challenge is resulting in an outpouring of creativity for me. I've written three songs and recorded one over the past three weeks while also completing all my work for the challenge. Go me!

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Video Killed the Radio Star. Live with Nate & Kate

Sat, 30 Oct 2010 09:30:00 -0700

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Week Two: Imperfect Pitch #msi9w3

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 17:12:00 -0700

I thought I did well with week two in the last way to the challenge… until now. Rereading chapter 2, I am struck by the situation that Ariel describes where a promising artist is completely unable to articulate what he sounds like. Ariel makes the point that if you can't relate to a fan using the new music that they're already familiar with, you will never succeed in getting them interested in you. So, all you have to do is come up with a clever and snappy one sentence description that in encapsulates your musical sound and influences, with bonus points for wittiness. Easy, right? The last time I went through this, I came up with a whole list of potentials. Inevitably, I ended up e-mailing all the people in my family who know me the best to bounce my ideas off of them. I settled on what you see now on the header of my website "polyphonic dream pop nostalgic for folk but ready to rock". So why am I considering changing it?

Don't get me wrong, I really like the pitch that I came up with. But I made a mistake. In Ariel's book, she recommends reading your pitch out loud standing in front of the mirror. "Does it feel comfortable to say it? If you feel like you're speaking your truth, you'll absolutely know, and then it is the perfect pitch for you". here's where I ran into problems. I didn't do this exercise last time, I just went with what sounded the best in my head and looked great written down. Fast forward to real life- I go out of my way to tell people I'm a musician because I believe networking is important ( more of this later in the challenge). Inevitably, they asked me what I sound like. And I would be lying if I didn't admit that I feel like a pompous jerk saying "I play polyphonic dream pop nostalgic for folk but ready to rock".

I'm thinking simpler may be better here. I really liked the term "back-beat" from the list that I generated last time around. my new thought is to go with "folk with the backbeat" or "polyphonic folk rock". More generic? Yes. Easier to say with a straight face? Yes. I turned to the forum for guidance.

The guidance there was:

-Polyphonic is too obscure of a word

-"Livingroom" is overused

..And my new batch of pitches:

Bittersweet folk with a psychedelic rock vibe.

Psychadelic folk with a rock drive and classical sensibility

Folk with a rock drive and classical sensibility

Folk rock cocktail with a shot of classical sensibility.

*Like a folk version of Radiohead collaborating with John Lennon

Weezer travels back in time and gets better taste

Weezer plays beard rock with the Beatles

*= I’m leaning towards it

Week 2 was when I first started getting behind on the last round of the challenge- From here we take our pitch and we apply it across our marketing materials, so not having one definitely puts a damper on what you can accomplish. And I still haven't decided what I'm going to go with. So, in the meantime I'm going to stick with what I've got and work on building a website/twitter/etc page that will be easy to update when a new and better pitch idea comes along.

photo by Ian Sane

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