Mason Rocket (Spy Extraordinaire)

Track 4 on the new "All In A Day's Work" CD has a special story to tell. While we put it on the RPM album, it was commissioned by Mur Lafferty. Mur has more achievements and accolades than we can cover here, but she is a podcast guru, author of the book Tricks of the Podcasting Masters, a science fiction writer, and of course a podcaster, running Geek Fu Action Grip, among many others. We first ran into Mur when she requested if she could play a song off of ours on her podcast in 2005. (Were All These Beer Cans Here Last Night, from the Cheapass album.)

She kept up with us, and when we released our Song of the Day daily podcast, she announced it on her own site, and wrote us a note. A month later, she asked us if we'd do a commission for a friend of hers. We said we'd be happy to!

She said that her friend Joe Murphy had been diagnosed with cancer. She wanted a song for him based on a nickname that she wanted to give him: "Mason Rocket." And then she said that it could be something about a spy.

And something just clicked.

I had been on Skype with Mur, and I muted it and recorded an idea that had instantly popped into my head. I got together with Jason a day or so later, and worked out the lyrics with him, and the band picked it up from there. The result can be heard on the Beatnik Turtle website in the player marked "Latest Album" on track 4. We're extremely happy with how it turned out. This song was meant to happen.

Joe is really struggling now, by the way, and has a fund in case you're interested in helping. You can find it here. We're glad that we could be a part of the effort to help him out, and we wish him the best.

Oh, and Mur is working on a written piece about a spy called Mason Rocket. We've heard an early draft, and it's just great! When it comes out, we'll announce it on our websites.

The RPM Challenge

The saying, "In for a penny, in for a pound" refers to the fact that a criminal in the UK would get the same sentence no matter what amount he stole. So why go small? Beatnik Turtle took the same attitude in tackling the RPM Challenge. Only in it's second year, the challenge is for bands that sign up to write, record, and produce an album of at least 10 songs or 35 minutes in 28 days, during the month of February. It's an idea that comes from National Novel Writing Month, which challenges writers to write a 50,000 word novel in November.

We at Beatnik Turtle figured since we were doing the Song of the Day, why not try to meet the RPM Challenge too, which seemed almost reasonable in comparison. It turned out to be a lot harder than we thought, but a very satisfying project. The result is our latest album, "All In A Day's Work." We're very happy with how the album came out, and we really enjoy listening to it. You can hear the album by going to the BeatnikTurtle.com main page and clicking on the "latest album" link. It will be for sale on all of the digital music stores as soon as we finish the artwork and upload it to CDBaby.

Although we started the project in earnest with only 19 days to go, we completed the album in time, mailing it by noon on March 1st, 2007 to the RPM Headquarters. We managed to write 13 songs, and the finished album was just over 35 minutes. We decided, since we always write about "whatever we feel like" for Song of the Day, that we'd add a theme: all of the songs had to be about working. The released album has three additional songs that weren't written in that month, for a total of 16 songs.

The reason this turned out to be difficult for us is that we had high standards for the songs for the album, and we even left one on the cutting room floor. (Don't worry, you'll get a chance to hear it at TheSongOfTheDay.com.) We also added a lot more parts than the average Song of the Day song, using four different lead singers, and added all of the horns that we could. I even was able to get out one of my favorite horns, my bass clarinet, and add it on two songs. But there's also trumpet, trombone, saxophones, clarinet, and flute parts. We also have a huge host of backup singers, including Cheyenne and Carrie, who have been helping us on Song of the Day.

The workhorses again are Jason and Tom, who did all kinds of mixdown, incidental parts, guitar parts, background vocals, and the "finishing process" for the album. They didn't get a lot of sleep in late February. Not that Jason expected much sleep, as he has a newborn on top of everything else.

We'd do this again in a heartbeat, and I wouldn't be surprised if we decided to do it next year. We are going to be attending the listening party for it, and meet the other bands who participated in the RPM Challenge that are located in Chicago.

We hope you enjoy the new album! Go ahead and give a listen at the Beatnik Turtle homepage, at the Latest Album link. Coming up in another entry very soon is a story about one of the songs on the album: Mason Rocket (Spy Extraordinare), track 4.

Song of the Day

The Song of the Day project is the most ambitious thing that we've done. We concepted the project in 2005, and really only began work on it in 2006, when we pulled in all of the musicians that we knew, and declared that we wanted to try to release a song for every day of 2007.

There's some confusion about how we've done Song of the Day because there's two ways to do projects like these. One is to wake up every morning knowing that you will write and record a song. The other way is to write and record a song for every day of the year. We did the latter. We might not write music every day, but some of the songs take months to complete, to get just the right vocals, or to add a violin part, or record the drums. Often, there are only a few people in the studio at a time, but each of us record on multiple songs when we are there. For a recent set of songs, for example, I think that two days in a row, I was in the studio recording saxophones, flute, clarinet, and bass clarinet, all in succession on four or five songs. Not all of the songs are so developed, of course. Some are just a guy with a guitar in one session, and then done.

We've worked with over 30 musicians on this project, and collaborate whenever we run into people that can contribute. This keeps the songs sounding different from each other. We make an effort to use different singers, different instrumentation, and different styles as often as we can. We'd get bored otherwise. As you can tell by the liner notes on each song, however, there's certainly a core of people that work on most of the songs. Just to clarify what we're doing with this: we aren't bringing other bands in to the project, we're really just pulling in collaborations in from time to time. Actually, many times, someone will come to the studio and lay down a guitar and vocal track, and we'll fill in the bass, drums, and whatever else the song calls for. And many times, they are amazed at what happens to the song afterwards.

The website for The Song of the Day was a major project itself. It uses MySQL, PERL, Apache, Flash, and ID3 tags, and it was started from a blank text file. The concept for the site's design came from a cross between webcomics (with elements from megatokyo.com, ozyandmillie.org, and sluggy.com), a tear-off quote calendar, and a podcast site. Matt Scholtka came up with the excellent visual design from that mishmash of ideas, and Dana Huyler who created the award-winning buttonmen.com website, did the backend work. I had the concept for the site, generally, and coordinated their efforts. The site is automatic. No one has to be awake at midnight central time to change the song over. And the RSS files for the daily podcasts are automatically created at midnight as well.

Mixing and engineering are mostly done by Jason and Tom, both of which have shouldered the vast unsung gruntwork of pulling the music for this this project together. Some of us are done when we finished our parts, but they are the ones who will then pull together the parts into the right places, mix the levels, add those little tweaks that make a song so much better, and then master it down to a MP3 file. Let's not forget tagging and naming the files right, too. All of that stuff takes a lot of time, believe us. And so they are definitely the workhorses of the project.

So that is the "what." We haven't discussed the "why?" And that's actually rather simple. We love songwriting, and it's a great creativity technique to do things based on quantity, rather than quality. You have to shut up that little critic in your head that insists that the new song you're working on is stupid. The only question becomes: "Is this a song?" And if the answer is yes, then you just press ahead. When you collaborate with talented people, even what seems to be a stupid idea can become something amazing. So, it's been an incredible process so far. We've been very pleased with how some of the songs have come out, and it's been a great experience for all of us.

One thing is for sure: We're never bored. Some people like going out drinking. Some like to watch movies. Some go fishing. We like writing and recording songs. And with so many songs yet to write, every time we get together we look at each other and say the same thing: "Let's write a song."

It's been a while...

This is Randy, and it really has been my fault that the blog went on hiatus for such a long time. We've been in the studio recording the Song of the Day project rather than writing about it. Part of the problem was that I was completely unhappy with our blog solution, which was overrun by spammers, and didn't have time to update our server. We eventually went to WordPress, which I'm quite happy with! I hope you enjoy the new blog, and especially the ability to keep track using RSS. I have it as a frame in the beatnikturtle.com website, and if you want to go here directly, you can go to http://blog.beatnikturtle.com for the non-frame blog.

I'm going to try to catch people up on what's happened in the last months in bits and bytes:

1. We launched http://thesongoftheday.com which is a website where we are releasing a new, original song, every single day of 2007. That's 365 songs. We'll be releasing that in 12 albums. Most of our time has been spent doing this project, including not just the music, but the custom-designed website as well.

2. We released "Thanks For Coming Out: Beatnik Turtle Live" in February, our first live album, and BT's fourth album. Many thanks to John Liesieki, who did a fantastic job recording and mixing the album.

3. We are releasing "All In A Day's Work", an album created for the RPM Challenge which challenges bands to write, record, and produce an album of at least 10 songs, or 35 minutes in just 28 days. The finished version will have the 13 songs that Beatnik Turtle submitted to the the challenge, and another 3 songs that we did prior that fit the theme of the album, which is all about working. We're very happy with how that came out.

4. We have continued to work on the Indie Band Surivival Guide, and are working on releasing a new "zine" for it that we will use to release interviews and articles.

5. We're playing the IPO again here in Chicago, and we're looking forward to getting on stage again after so many months of being in the studio.

6. We're playing on Live radio coming up soon, at the Razor and Die show on WLUW. This is a station that we've been looking forward to playing on for quite some time, so we've very excited.

So welcome back! I hope to have more background for you later.

The Blog is Back

After a long hiatus, the blog is back. We’ve spent so much time making music and writing that we haven’t been able to write any entries.

But we’re back, and we’ll be adding posts for you to keep up with us shortly, as soon as we integrate this blog fully into our website.

APIG Finally Says What It Thinks Of DRM

We're not talking about a barnyard animal, here, we're talking about the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group in the UK. Beatnik Turtle is a US band, but the internet is international. On top of that, according to our sales figures, we sell a fair number of songs in iTunes-UK. So if the question is why a Chicago indie band cares what happens in another country, the answer is that we have the financial interest to prove it. We're not just covering things like this to rant.

Their recommendations are surprisingly cogent and show a deep understanding of the issues. Evidently, this committe has people with a clear conception of the subtle interaction between technology and law. Many committees like these are overrun with monied interests. Instead, we are impressed by the scope of what they recommend. You can find their report on their website.

Perhaps the most important recommendation that they make is that the government should NOT legislate to make DRM systems mandatory.

Increasingly, we are seeing signs of legislation in the US to do that very thing. It seems that the UK is similarly affected. These efforts are misguided, and usually end up hurting technology. It also especially hurts indie bands, because it raises the costs that we have to pay to get our music to people. All of the popular DRM schemes in the world are proprietary, and thus gives a middleman a potential cut of sales depending on how much they charge.

Even worse, many indie bands like ourselves don't like DRM and don't want to restrict what our fans want to do with our own music. Making legislation to force us to punish our paying fans while leaving the ones that pirate with the freedom to do what they wish is especially egregious.

If you have an interest in what is going on in the US along these lines, we recommend keeping up with the Electronic Frontier Foundation at eff.org, especially at their DRM page. There are glimmerings of this legislation on the horizon in the US, and we will cover them here in the blog because we find that it directly affects us.

Lots of News!

The band has been incredibly busy in the last weeks, and we have to apologize for the delay in the blog entires. Part of it is that we're trying to get used to making bite-sized updates rather than writing a longer work.

We're going to do our best to write more, and smaller, updates to this blog as we do things. As it is, we need to catch everyone up. To say that it's been exciting is really highly understating the impact of the last few weeks.

Billboard Article
Todd Martens of Billboard gave us a call about the Survival Guide about 5 or 6 weeks ago and asked us to do an interview about it. The interview was a pleasure, and he wrote a tremendous article that appeared in Billboard in the May 20, 2006 edition.

Todd Martens got it right, and represented us quite well. Thanks Todd! It was an unexpected pleasure.

Todd did great, but as far as our other experiences with the media in the past...I don't know how to say this nicely, so I won't try: Some of the journalists that we've dealt with have been a bit lazy. They tend to get facts wrong, or misspell names, etc. We had a hilariously wrong mention in the Chicago Tribune just recently where they said that we were in the recent Sketchfest. We were in it two years ago, it's true, and a comedy group did use a recording of BT as their theme music this year, and we were in the audience...but we didn't play. That particular mistake was a happy one for us because they did give us a nice mention, after all. Other articles, we weren't so lucky, and the mistakes were to our detriment. But Todd is a profesional and it shows. We loved it.

Now, for the backstage part of this: We didn't send a press release to Billboard, or plan this in any way. In fact, we were never going to try for that particular pulication in our PR plan because we thought that they were out of reach. It shows that you can limit your thinking sometimes, and that could hold you back.

Todd found out about The Survival Guide and Beatnik Turtle from the Lawrence Lessig Blog. We sent another thank you to Professor Lessig for mentioning us, as it seems that he is quite well read by a lot of folks. We're very happy for him, because he's having an influence on people as it relates to copyright. We're also glad that we could include his ideas, and his ideals, in our own work, and help spread the word.

For those bands that read this blog, we have learned something out of this episode that we will add to a future edition to the guide: Blog mentions and internet postings DO have an effect on your publicity, and can be effective ways to spread your message. It does have to be a unique message, but from there, you can't be sure where it goes. I believe the group Clap Your Hands Say Yeah had similar experiences, where they were quite surprised to be taken up by certain corners of the internet, and they had a lot of great attention afterwards.

Website Redesign
Beatnik Turtle takes care of our own website, in most every way. We are the web designers, graphic artists, tech guys, and content writers. We consider the website our most important ambassidor to the world, so we spend a lot of time on it, and keep it in our own control.

After the interview for the article, but before the release, we finally took on what we had been putting off in terms of a redesign. Our acquaintence with a fantastic web designer, Matt Scholtka, cemeted it for us, because he gave us a lot of very practical, and well considered advice. He was instrumental to the affair. And helped us do web design and graphic arts where our own meager skills fell short.

We use a content management system called Typo3 which has a great deal of flexibility, and allows us to handle the well-over one hundred pages on the Beatnik Turtle website. We have a lot of content, and managing it can only be done with an engine as powerful as Typo3. Typo3 allows us to make design changes in just one of a few templates, and have it take effect across the entire guide, for instance. But it takes a bit longer to do work with Typo3 than it does with standard HTML. That price is well worth paying when your changes are automatically applied across everything you have, and even to new pages as they are created. And we're been creating a lot of new pages lately.

We hope you like the new design. It's that redesign, more than anything else, that kept us from posting to the blog. Two people spent at least 100 hours each on it. Usually coming straight home from work, doing the website until 1 AM, and waking up to do the whole thing again.

Songwriting
One of our favorite activities to do is songwriting. In spite of everything going on, we still have been getting together and writing new music. Sometimes, as much as 5 or 6 songs a session. Much of this is for a project that we will be announcing in 6 months or so. Although we can't talk about the project yet, you can be sure that there will be a lot of new music involved!

When you have your own studio, and love writing music, there is something magical that happens when you do it. You go in to a session with perhaps some ideas, or perhaps a clear head. You walk out with a short CD of songs that never existed before you got there. Listening to something like that in your car on the way back from a session is really exciting.

BT Video
BT is playing with video, and flash projects. There may be some video up on the Beatnik Turtle website in the next few months.

In fact, tonight, one of the band members is going to their local cable access facility to get certified on their equipment for some other projects.

Guide Sendup
Thanks to all of you who have sent in "Thank you" messages to us based on the guide. Yes, we do read them. In fact, we try to answer ALL of the messages that come in. (Well, except for the spam.)

Since we're not doing the Survival Guide guide for money, the Thank You messages are how we get paid. They are quite welcome. Suggestions, ideas, and critiques are no less welcome.

Also, there is more guide material coming soon. First of all, there are new articles and material planned. Second, we're doing interviews of interesting people, and will be adding it to the site. Also, we're going to be writing reviews of the many books that we used to research the guide to give other bands an idea of what these books are like, from an indie band's perspective.

As a result, the Survival Guide section will likely have two parts: A permanent part that has the Survival Guide itself which will be updated as we add material to it. There will also be a webzine part that is intended for monthly updates as we put up the interviews, book reviews, and articles.

Live Album Mixdown
The mixdown of the live album continues during this process, in the able hands of our sound guru paired up with a few other band members. We don't yet have a release plan for it just yet. We hope to finish work on this by the end of summer, however.

Conclusion
We have a sneaking suspicion that we're missing something in this large entry. But it's been a while since we've updated, and we're dashing this one out as it is. We'll be making more, and smaller, entries coming soon to keep people up to date with the Backstage of an Indie Band.

One other thing: You may wonder how we're doing all of this, considering that we're all working full time profesionally as well. We sometimes wonder that too. But the answer is simple: we got more people involved with these projects. People who know video, people who know flash, others that do web design, and yet others that just love writing and recording music. We're at the center of the whirlwind, and certainly busy, but it's because we've grown our conception of what we are to include more people and more projects than just music. We want to thank all of the new folks who are working with us.