It’s been said that it takes 10,000 hours of practice and preparation to be an expert at something (notably in the book Outliers by Malcom Gladwell). 10,000 hours to be a genius, to be a success. The Beatles are the common example. They were no overnight success; by the time they started hitting it big, they had played over a thousand shows (mostly in Germany).
Ten thousand hours is a pretty long time. It’s well over a solid year of practice with no sleeping or eating to get in the way. If you practiced something for two hours a day, every day, it would add up to over 13 and a half years. At the time of this writing, I’ve been playing guitar for about 15 years. Sometimes I’ve played for 4 hours in a day. Sometimes I’ve played for no hours in a day.
Am I an expert musician? I wouldn’t personally say so. But I’ve certainly come a long, long way. The thought of going back and doing it all again is almost excruciating. I’m at a point where I really feel good things are happening and I’m actually ready, willing and prepared for them to happen. But that’s a tough place to get to. If you had told me even a couple years ago that I’d have to wait at least another couple years, I’d have gone a little crazy. Sometimes it’s really good to not know things.
But what I wonder about the 10,000 hour rule is if emotional time counts. There have been countless minutes that I did not spend working on music, for example times when I couldn’t do it because I was stuck in a classroom learning about the symbolism of The Great Gatsby. But many of those same minutes were spent in a place completely away from where I physically was. A place where I was composing music in my head, conjuring ideas for promoting the next show, dreaming about the feeling of being in the recording studio with a guitar in my hand, laying down a track that moved me. Those were genuine emotional hours I’ve put into music. If they counted, I’d say I reached the 10,000 mark long ago.
Practice makes perfect, but passion makes it authentic.
Today is the perfect time to think about tomorrow.
We all have plans for 2010, grand or otherwise. I never really make resolutions because they just feel like I’m trying to convince myself to break habits I don’t feel confident breaking. Plans usually have more structure and wonderfully loose ends, whereas resolutions are uncomfortably finite.
Now is the best time to think about later.
What are some of my goals for the year? Inspiration; I want to be inspired by life and I want to learn from the ways people around me are living it. Passion; I love what I do when it comes to music. I’m also planning on loving life itself. The ups, the downs, the in-betweens. Mission; I hope to spend the year working hard but also having meaning behind what I do. Meaning creates drive, and drive gets you places. Connection; I hope to feel the transcendence I’ve felt so many times before from the interconnectedness of the people I know, the people I meet, and the people I learn about.
I also want to floss more.
Only time will tell what 2010 will bring, but I’m planning on making the best of it. 2009 was an unbelievable year for me for so many reasons. It only makes me fascinated to wonder what the next one will have in store.
If you’re interested in a little thoughtful inspiration for the new year, take a look at this free eBook: What Matters Now
And since I didn’t post it before, I’ll close out ‘09 by posting the new Shaimus video for “Like a Fool”
Birthdays are a lot like New Year’s Eve in that they are often a time when people reflect on the year that’s past, how they’ve grown, what they’ve accomplished, and maybe mistakes that they’ve made. Some people fret about another year that’s gone by and how much shorter life seems after every 365 days. Other people don’t think about it too much at all and just use it as an excuse to party. I think I’ve done all three at one point or another.
But usually I spend at least a little time reflecting on all the things that have happened and how much I’ve changed over the course of a year. I assume the average person goes through about as much or as little as I do in any given year, so I rarely find the need to openly share things I’ve learned or accomplished. But as you reach your mid and late 20s, I think it’s only natural for a lot of people to start feeling like their youth is slipping away more and more quickly as their age rises. I’ve certainly felt that before, but I’m finished with it.
In the relatively unconventional life path I’ve chosen, I can’t use the lives and accomplishments of my peers as a comparison to my own, even if they’re in the same industry as me. Life is long and I have a lot of time to do all the things I eventually want to do (hopefully, anyway). I set no deadlines and I make no ultimatums. I have goals and aspirations that I work towards every day, and as long as I’m doing everything within my power to be where I want to be, the rest is out of my hands. All I can do is live life to the fullest extent that I know how; seeing where it takes me is the whole adventure of it all. I have found that getting too specific with life’s grand plans only takes away from the point. And the point is the unknown. I prefer to keep specific goals and projects to shorter term time frames. It makes so much more sense this way. If you say “I’m going to do this before I’m 30,” you’re putting unnecessary pressure on yourself, causing you to worry about it now and later be disappointed with yourself if you don’t meet the arbitrary deadline. Especially when there’s plenty of time afterwards to accomplish the goal just as well.
Don’t say “I’m going to see the great pyramids before I’m 35.” Don’t say “I want to be married by the time I’m 30.” Keep the hopes and dreams, and lose the deadlines. Your life will be so much more fulfilling that way. Of course, you still have to go out there and DO it. You have to live your life. You have to work towards the goals every day. But if you say you want to see the pyramids before you’re 35, you might wait until you’re 34 and start to panic. So start now. Or start later. But I think it’s a good general rule to not apply anything with the word “dead” on it to my life, so that includes deadlines.
I want to live in New Zealand someday. I’m not sure when, but I definitely want to. It could be when I’m 32. It could be when I’m 52. I’ll figure it out at some point, but I haven’t yet. And that doesn’t matter. Life’s not passing me by, I’m just along for the ride. I can’t wait to see where it takes me.
Social networking. A now-ubiquitous term that conjures images of Facebook, nerds, wasted work hours, and (thanks to recent Foster’s commercials) grimy Australians shouting at each other from a distance. These days, it seems you can’t enjoy a useful website without having to sign in, make a profile which reflects the person you’d like to be in the cyber world, and start spending your time networking, “friending,” and generally sucking up precious minutes connecting with other theoretical people. At this point, while I don’t mind having to sign into various sites, the social networking side of things starts to scare me off; as soon as I know I can have buddies, friends, or whatever-the-hell, I think about how much work goes into doing that, how little energy I actually want to exert on it, and how having a small buddy list makes you look inadequate and renders the whole thing pointless (not to mention the question of whether or not I would insult potential “friends” by not adding them due to my high level of apathy). Can’t I just post some videos online without seeing the dreaded e-mail that says “jdpstudman wants to be your friend?”
I’m generally in the minority on this from what I can tell. Social networking as a prerequisite for a successful site can only mean, I assume, that most people demand the feature in as many aspects of their daily lives as is possible. So I’m not one to knock it as a concept, really. I’m a “live and let live” sort of person–I don’t generally care what you do as long as you’re not hurting me or others. People can social network the shit out each other for all I care. And it’s not as though I take no part in it. I’m on Facebook daily and I enjoy reading the occasional witty status update (operating word: OCCASIONAL) and seeing photos of my friends’ recent drunken escapades. But I just can’t bring myself to fully embrace the extent to which it’s taking over our daily lives.
Because I enjoy Facebook, I try to make it my primary, and if possible only, mode of social networking. I don’t want to log into ten sites a day to see what YouTube videos random people have posted. It’s because of this that I’ve all but abandoned MySpace, the original outlet of most people’s networking needs. But MySpace is a good example of a necessary evil for musicians; I don’t really want to be on there, but it’s important for all bands to have a page. It’s like Twitter, which has been blowing up as of late. I do have a “personal” Twitter, but it’s just a feed of my Facebook statuses and I never really use it other than that. I’d probably avoid Twitter altogether if it weren’t for the fact that it’s important for Shaimus to have a presence on the site. Maybe I’ll use mine more often later on, but for now it’s really just kind of there as a placeholder for when I decide what I really want to do with it.
This blog is no different, really. I’ve spent a lot of time pondering what specifically to use it for. Just news updates? Boring. Deep, intimate descriptions of my thoughts and feelings? Too personal. A long, thoughtful post every six months? Seems too infrequent to keep anyone interested. Constant little posts about what I’m doing? Seems to revealing or mundane. So what, then? I’m still not really sure. One of my least favorite aspects of social networking is the constant urge it gives you to say what you’re feeling at any given moment, and the constant feeling of others that they’re close to you and keeping up to date with your life by reading a few sentences a day. I don’t want anyone to think they know me via the Internet, and I’m a private person who is well aware that in my industry the more success you have, the less privacy you often get. I’m increasingly cautious of what I put out there online, how I present myself, and how much I reveal. But at the same time, it’s so great for musicians to use the Internet to connect directly with fans and have them feel involved. It’s a double-edged sword for sure.
And so I’ll continue pondering and strategizing my online presence, probably to no end. But luckily I have no obligation to decide either way what kind of “social networker” I am. Many people have found their place, but I have not. And that’s OK for now. I’ll just continue on with my everyday life as I normally would, but with an option to be a little more “connected.” I just have one simple request: don’t buy into the idea that just because you CAN constantly update people with your activities, it doesn’t mean they really care that the club sandwich you had for lunch had way too much mayo on it. Some things are best kept to yourself and left a little sacred; the inane things are the most sacred of all.
I’m always proud of how talented my friends are. Every once in a while, I like to share their music and accomplishments with everyone I can. Today I’d like to mention a few pals that are doing good things.
Elizabeth and the Catapult
I was a big fan of their self-titled and self-released EP, but their first full-length album on the Verve label is worth listening to over and over and over. And over again. These are songs that are not only well-crafted, but immortalized in a pristine production that reveals more with each listen. (What a cliche thing to say. This is why I hate writing about music.)
My good friend Steve Yonkin plays bass for this cool electro-pop/rock band (is that a good description? I neither know nor care) who is up to lots of very good things these days. Listen to them now so that you can be with the “in” crowd before they’re really popular and make you look like a bandwagoner.
My college roommate and one of my best friends Hank Woods moved to New York City when I moved to LA. I often sat around in the sun, wondering what the hell he was going to do with his life having grown up playing jazz trumpet and then suddenly shifting to rock guitar during school. It turns out he would get picked up for a gig with Rescue Me star Mike Lombardi’s band, Apache Stone, and now he’s more of a rock star than I’ll ever dream of being. Even more of one than he’ll ever dream of being!
OK fine. One thing about me to finish this post off. The Shaimus song “Tie You Down” will be appearing in the ABC Family show “Ruby and the Rockits” on September 22nd. But I knew you’d already be watching that show anyway, so I was just gonna let it be a surprise.
Oh the silence around this blog has been deafening lately. Though it’s easy to say I’ve neglected my duties, that’s pretty inaccurate since I don’t technically have any “duties” to take care of on my site. The easiest promise to live up to is one you don’t make, so I’ve happily made no promise to update at regular time intervals. But it’s true that long stretches between posts doesn’t do much for my blogging cred, though I still subscribe to the “quality over quantity” school of thought. Or anything over quantity, really.
Spring has turned to summer, and the mercury has steadily risen. What have I been up to? Everything and nothing at the same time it would seem. I’ve had vast stretches of off time that were used for extensive relaxing in addition to countless menial tasks meant to get my life in order and accomplish personal goals. When Shaimus lost a guitarist this past spring (though we are making our triumphant return to the stage on August 4th at the Troubadour), I came upon even more unexpected free time than I had even planned on, and one task I’ve taken to has been laying down some music that I’ve been meaning to record for ages. More on that in a (near) future post.
Some things over the past few months have gone oh so well. Others have gone oh so poorly. Such is life, so “they” say. Although I wouldn’t mind life strictly going well for at least a little while. A few months here and there, maybe? I suppose I could be asking too much. I think a recent story sums up my life as of late quite well. Perhaps it does the same for yours:
Five years ago, I was at a party for student employees at Berklee College of Music, where I worked in the Media Development office. They had a raffle with gift certificates to Newbury Comics, a popular local music/comic/pop culture store. The biggest one was worth $100, and by a rare stroke of luck I happened to win it. For a college student, a hundred bucks seemed like a pile of gold bricks, so I set it aside and plotted what CDs and DVDs I would add to my collection. A few days later, it was gone. Whether I had misplaced it, unintentionally thrown it away, or was the victim of theft I had no idea. But there was no trace of it. I silently cried on the inside. Then I moved on with my life.
Flash forward to May 2009. Hank Woods, my former roommate/one of my best friends/guitarist of the Mike Lombardi-fronted rock band Apache Stone, calls me one sunny afternoon. While this sort of occurrence is not out of the blue, what he asked me about was. “I seem to recall about five years ago you lost a Newbury Comics gift certificate,” he said. Turns out, while discussing the finer points of the music business with a friend, Hank had pulled out a book that he hadn’t opened since college. What should fall onto the street but my old prize. What are the odds? And conveniently, just days later he was headed from New York City to Los Angeles and would be able to hand it directly to me. I also discovered that Newbury Comics, a local Boston company, happened to have a website that I could order from.
What a rollercoaster of luck I was on–win $100. Lose it without a trace in Boston, MA. Have it found five years later in New York and returned to me on the West Coast. Then to top the story off, after browsing the Newbury Comics site for an hour and figuring out what I would be getting, I went to check out only to find that you can’t use their gift certificates online.
Chalk that last one up to life, but I’ll have the last laugh anyway. Just might take a little more than five more years.
This week was an interesting one in the world of Evan Brown (your favorite world, admit it). Last night, Shaimus played our last show with Dave Middleton, our other guitarist, and the band will never be the same again. No live playing for a little while as we try to find the perfect replacement. Auditions are officially open for those about to rock.
Also, for three days this week I had the pleasure of being on the set of the Sony Screen Gems film The Roommate, a thriller starring Minka Kelly (Friday Night Lights), Cam Gigandet (Twilight), and Leighton Meester (Gossip Girl). Two of our songs are going to be featured in the movie, and we got to “perform” them for the film. Phil unfortunately couldn’t make it one of the days, so Cam pretended to be the lead singer/keyboardist with the help of a little movie magic (i.e. lip syncing). Hilarious. He and I even got lines, but I expect mine will end up on the cutting room floor.
Leaving the set was sad, I felt like I was going home from summer camp. But I don’t exactly have the desire to be a movie star, so I can’t say I wanted to stay forever. Although they DID make my hair look cool and force me to wear clothes that “hip” people wear. So at least I was cool for three days of my life. I think the movie is scheduled to be released next year, so I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out. Below is a picture of Cam, Johannes and I with director Christian Christiansen. He, like everybody else on the set, was a really nice guy. More photos from our time on the set, including glimpses of our prison cell-like trailers and my skin-tight jeans, can be seen here.
And finally this week, I accomplished the lifelong dream of appearing in an online video with Tay Zonday, AKA the “Chocolate Rain” guy! I present to you, Totally Sketch’s True Internet Story of Keyboard Cat:
I recently came across a blog called “Not Always Right,” which details people’s run-ins with moronic customers while working retail jobs. It’s pretty addictive to read the accounts of jaw-dropping stupidity, and as someone who has worked retail in the past, I sadly relate to many of the stories.
I hated retail with a passion. Customers tend to believe that since you’re trying to make them happy, they can walk all over you and treat you like shit because it’s their right. Of course, not all customers are assholes; I met a lot of really cool, nice people while working in the accessories department of Guitar Center. But the fact is, I have story upon story that would unfortunately qualify for inclusion in the aforementioned blog.
One of the reasons I left my Sunset Blvd sales post was that I just don’t have the right attitude for customer service. When people prod me, I tend to prod back. When someone tries to put me down, my initial response is generally to put them in their place with an acerbic remark of some sort. I just wasn’t made for retail, it would seem.
One of my favorite stories from working at Guitar Center has to do with a very common occurrence of idiocy that happened every day in that store—people trying to haggle down prices on small items that they are not planning on buying in bulk. A guy came up to the counter and said, “What’s the best deal you can give me on those D’Addario strings?”
My first response when people asked me that was to simply turn my head, look at the price, and repeat it right back to them. “$3.50 a pack, sir.” His response: “Is that the best you can do?”
At this point I’m already irritated with the guy. He makes no attempt to work up a rapport with the employee who has the power to give him a discount. He is trying to haggle down one of the lowest-priced products of one of the lowest-priced items in the store, guitar strings. But I was usually happy to accommodate such requests if they were looking to buy 10 or 15 packs at a time. So the rest of the conversation went as follows:
Me - “Well, how many do you want to get today?”
Him - “Oh, just one.”
Me - “Is that the best you can do?”
Him - *grumbling* “OK, OK, I get it.”
He proceeded to buy it at—gasp—full price. From then on, a co-worker of mine referred to me as Evan “Is That The Best You Can Do” Brown.
A couple weeks ago, I played with Shaimus at the CD release party for our new album, The Sad Thing Is, We Like It Here. The show was great fun—sold out crowd, solid performance, giveaways, videos, and plenty of other good stuff. But above all, it was a celebration marking the culmination of well over a year of hard work.
When all is said and done, this album was about three years in the making. The earliest songs were written and honed during our 2006 summer West Coast tour, including “Turn the Other Way,” “Interview,” and embryonic versions of “Don’t Want the Story” and “While We’re Young.” “Heads or Tails” was written during a time when Phil, Johannes and I were playing acoustic shows in L.A. while Dave and Cam finished up school on the other side of the country. “Tie You Down” was a last second addition that practically didn’t even make it on the album, and recording was pushed back a couple weeks just so we could finish it; good thing, too, as that turned out to be one of the best and most popular songs on the record.
That was around late October/early November of 2007. We tracked all of Cam’s drums in our old Van Nuys rehearsal space that December; imagine his impatience having recorded almost all of his parts over a year before the album would even come out. We followed this with laying down roughly finished versions of five of the strongest tracks which would be used for our demo. Our demo was sorely in need of an update, since the band’s sound had developed so much from our first album that it didn’t accurately represent us anymore. These new songs were far more illustrative of the “Shaimus sound” as it had come to be over the past couple years—a more cohesive, collaborative band effort with more energy and focus than Paper Sun (not to say there isn’t good material on that CD).
We took a brief break from recording after that. Trying to throw high-quality recordings together at a breakneck pace while contending with often-miserable day jobs was very taxing on all of us. During this break, we made a music video for “Turn the Other Way” with Adam Kerpelman. Not only did we feel like the song was a good choice for a single, but its theme of 9 to 5 frustration resonated with all of us. Oh, and of course it gave us an awesome excuse to smash the shit out of some office equipment.
Once summer 2008 rolled around we were antsy to finish what we’d started. We finished up guitars for the remaining five songs in our new West L.A. rehearsal space, recorded real piano in some recording studios to replace the samples that were used on the demo, and got final takes of all vocals, auxiliary percussion, and other odds and ends (mostly recorded in bedroom closets). Finally, Johannes busted his ass mixing the entire thing after it was all edited properly, Phil put the final touches on the artwork, we sent it off to get mastered and replicated, and then sat back and breathed a giant, collective sigh of relief. Oh, and Phil made a music video with a Powershot camera in his underwear.
This album represents a lot of blood, sweat, tears and calluses, and I think it turned out great. It’s certainly the best thing I’ve been a part of musically, and I put so much of myself into it that I can’t help but be nothing but proud. So, get more of a sense of the process of making this record with the next video, take a listen to the samples below and consider buying it. Now is the time for us to spread the word about all our hard work, and you can help!
I was talking to a friend recently about artists that you just wish would stop releasing albums, if only to preserve their legacy. The conversation started while listening to “You Better You Bet” on the radio; while it’s by no means the worst song in the world, any time I hear it I just wish the Who had stopped recording new music after Keith Moon died. They already had a massive catalog of classic hits, and fans always want to hear their favorite bands go out on top. A large element of this desire is most certainly selfish—I have no place to decide when a band should or should not stop making music, of course (unless maybe I’m in that band). But it’s not that I want the members of the Who to cease all music making, I just don’t want any more Who albums that don’t feel like Who albums.
But of course artists soldier on, often outstaying their welcome for the simple fact that they can still sell records. Bands like U2 and Aerosmith just keep adding faceless releases that do nothing to their discography other than increase its number, often obscuring the fact that, at some point, they were on top of their game and making top-notch music (for me personally this is illustrated much better with Aerosmith as I’m a sort of middle-of-the-road guy with U2, but you get the point). Or, perhaps more frustratingly, bands like Bon Jovi and Def Leppard who have rightfully called it quits that come back for more when no one really wanted them to in the first place. It’s not that these bands shouldn’t get back together and tour again, but the new albums are almost always a huge let down and lack the energy and electricity of their earlier material.
There are exceptions to every rule, of course, and there are some great artists who continue to release quality music for decades. But this happens so often, I had to ask myself why. Do artists naturally lose their edge with age? Is the rebellious “fuck you” attitude of younger rock-n-rollers inescapably softened as they grow older, wiser, and more successful? Both of these are legitimate possibilities. But what it really seems to come down to is a brand of lethargy that is inevitably allowed after an artist has become established. Emerging artists work against an intimidating tide of opposition: control freak A&R people, seasoned career advisors, and executives with dollar signs in their eyes. The amount of times a young musician is told he can’t, shouldn’t, couldn’t, or won’t do something is about as frequent as Jaleel White is asked to say “Did I do that” in the Urkel voice by strangers on the street.
Conversely, the more success a band has, the more freedom they gain. At first this is extremely liberating, allowing artists to break out of the mold and make some of their best work. But at some point, the pendulum seems destined to start swinging back. You know why Paul McCartney has released a number of terrible albums despite the fact that he spent years establishing himself as one of the finest songwriters in history? Because nobody would ever dare say “no” to Macca. He has almost no choice but to be constantly surrounded by sycophantic well-wishers who just think it’s a great honor to be in the control room when he lays down a track with his viola bass. U2 releases “Get On Your Boots” because nobody is going to tell them it’s a stupid song. Why? “Because they’re fucking U2, man!”
But back to Paul McCartney for my conclusion, because he sums up the point so nicely. A few years ago, he released what was easily one of the best albums he’s ever done as a solo artist, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. What had come over him when he did it? He had hired producer Nigel Goodrich, who started telling him to make a bunch of changes and drop any songs he didn’t like from the recording. I even read an interview when Paul said he was taken aback by Goodrich’s attitude at first, thinking he didn’t have to take it and could just as easily get rid of him. But he came to realize that attitude was exactly what he needed to make a great record. And it worked.
Now flash back to Paul’s old band, The Beatles. (You’ve heard of them, right?) An extraordinary career to say the least, and they closed it out with Abbey Road, an album that one can make a compelling argument for being their best (or at least pretty damn close). One might wonder what we might have missed out on if they just kept going a few more records, but it wasn’t too long after that when we heard some not-so-par-for-the-course songs from at least one of the principal songwriters of the group. How happy would folks be to add a bad Beatles album to their collection? It sticks out like a sore thumb.
I always have some misgivings when I hear Radiohead is going to release a new album for fear that their creative juices are running low. But with the fact that In Rainbows was so great, I can’t help but wonder: should they go out on top while they still can, or am I at risk of missing out on some incredible music if they stop too early? Maybe a bad album or two isn’t such a bad thing, after all.
A couple weeks ago, I played with Shaimus at the CD release party for our new album, The Sad Thing Is, We Like It Here. The show was great fun—sold out crowd, solid performance, giveaways, videos, and plenty of other good stuff. But above all, it was a celebration marking the culmination of well over a year of hard work.
